


Light in the Loafers (1959-1960)

by fabfemmeboy



Series: Immutability and Other Sins [2]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, homophobia; racism; probably some sexism; it was the 1950s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-10 20:24:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 240,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12919596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabfemmeboy/pseuds/fabfemmeboy
Summary: When Kurt enrolled at Dalton Academy in the fall of 1959, he thought he was merely biding his time until his cowtown caught up to the rest of the state. Instead he met a beautiful boy and got a lot more than he bargained for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written a few years ago and is now being transferred to this site with the author's permission. Apologies for any glitches you find (e.g. dead links). We're fixing them as fast as we can.

"Well, buddy," he said, glancing over at his son then back up at the gargantuan brick building perched on the perfectly-manicured lawn, "What do you think?"

The boy reached up to flick his brown hair back with his thumb. His father was going to need to ask a more specific question than that; what did he think of what? Of the building? It was huge, easily three times the size of his old school - and this was only the main academic building. The dormitories were made up of four buildings approximately the same size over on the north side of campus. From looking at the map he had been handed upon arrival, he wondered how in the world he could get from the housing area to his classes in less than about fifteen minutes, for all the lush green lawns and athletic fields settled between the two. He tried to remind himself that at home - back home, now, he corrected himself; this would be his day-to-day home for at least the next year, probably the next two - he had to drive about that long, but somehow this seemed more daunting.

Of the school? He didn't know yet. All he knew was the name - Dalton Academy - and that the academics were rigorous, which he suspected would be a welcome change from his previous classes. Oh, and of course he knew that it was a private boys' school, but that much everyone knew: it was written right there on almost every piece of paper he had received from the school, from the informational brochure to the acceptance letter to the orientation packet, almost part of the school's name, right there on the masthead. They seemed to take an inordinate amount of pride in that part of their identity, and he wasn't sure what that meant or whether it was a good thing yet.

Or was his father asking what he thought about all of it, about the fact that this was his life now?

This wasn't how the year was supposed to go, that much he did know. He wasn't supposed to be here, at some private academy that looked like it was trying to be a junior Harvard, surrounded by boys whose families probably earned more money in three months than his dad did in twelve. He was supposed to be at McKinley. He was supposed to be celebrating the first year that he and Mercedes were actually allowed to go to the same school. He was supposed to be sitting in the auditorium while she proudly auditioned for the glee club - his glee club - and knocked the ever-annoying Rachel Berry off her pedestal. He was supposed to be able to sit with her at lunch and pass notes with her when the science teacher droned on for too long. He was supposed to finally have his best friend - his only friend, really - at school with him.

But no. Some crazy racist had sufficiently scared enough parents to get the school board to announce that they were going to defy the Ohio legislature and the Supreme Court of the United States alike. No way was anyone going to force them to obey what had been the law of the land for literally more than three years already. They weren't going to be compelled to do something so radical as allow their white children to mingle with non-white children.

He didn't understand it. But then, he never had. Just one of the many ways in which he was different from pretty much every person he'd ever met in Lima.

So when the school board stated that two, four, six, eight, they had no intentions to integrate, a group of families from each of the other two schools in town - one for black students, one for Asians - had brought a lawsuit to force the school board to do it; after all, they argued, Brown v. Board said they had to, and when schools in Virginia tried to close the entire public school system to resist compliance, the Supreme Court had said that was unconstitutional as well. The board saw an opportunity; after all, the cases in Virginia had taken years to work their way up the judicial ladder, and they required a substantial amount of both money and drive. If they could hold off an immediate change, there was a decent chance - they believed - that the non-white families would run out of steam and cash and drop the case like the families in Hillsboro had last year. They announced in April that William McKinley Senior High School would be closed beginning for the 1959-60 school year and continuing either until the status quo was upheld, or until the court "came down here to force us themselves."

That quote had come from the mayor. Kurt had never felt so lucky to live in such an enlightened town that prided itself on being in line with states that would secede from the country tomorrow if they thought they could restore slavery.

The summer had been filled with tense negotiations, including an interesting side-argument as to whether the Asian school should exist at all; because the only Ohio laws ever passed to specify which races were separate referred only to "negroes" (and even then only in the context of marriage, and the law had been repealed in 1887 anyway), there was strong argument by the Asian families that their children should have been going to McKinley all along and should certainly be allowed to do so now. However, because laws did specifically say "white" and "colored" and technically the Asian children weren't white, that argument got derailed quickly. But by the time August dawned, the parties had stood on the front steps of City Hall to announce that McKinley would indeed remain closed. The subtext that dripped from everyone's speeches but was never spoken? "Your children will not be getting an education this year, and we all know who's to blame for that."

He doubted he would ever understand what people found so frightening about his best friend, but he had long ago resigned himself to not understanding most of what people in Lima believed.

"Are you sure about this, Dad?" Kurt asked, squinting a little as he looked over at his father. The man was wearing a tie; that meant this was definitely a formal occasion. He looked horribly uncomfortable, and the tie was a hideous shade of green that made Kurt kind of want to rip it off and replace it with any other accessory. "Are you sure we shouldn't be sending Finn?"

His stepbrother was a senior this year; it didn't seem right to take that away.

"Don't you worry about Finn," Burt instructed. "He's turning 18 soon anyway. I got him pulling hours at the shop. He doesn't need another year of school - but you do, if you're going to those fancy colleges you keep looking at."

Finn probably would have refused to go anyway, would've refused to leave his friends, his girlfriend, all to live two hours away at a school without so much as girls to look at. And if the academics really were as challenging as the literature led them to believe, it was probably a good idea they hadn't elected to send Finn. Kurt loved the guy and all, but he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.

"Besides," Burt added. "It's prob'ly gonna blow over by Christmas, y'know, open the school up for the spring semester." Neither Hummel wore optimism enthusiastically or well, and Kurt's raised eyebrow let his dad know how he felt on the subject. Burt just nodded and let out a breath slowly. "Let's get you over to the room," he suggested, picking up the larger of the suitcases. The decision of which clothes to bring had nearly killed him - even if the school did require uniforms, which he hated thinking about. They weren't even attractive uniforms, ones that would look smart and distinguished; the hideous red piping on the navy blazer, the indescribable and peculiar shade of grey used for the trousers, the surprisingly nondescript tie, it all just served to make students look boxy and wholly uninteresting.

They earned a lot of stares on the way across campus; Kurt sincerely doubted it was because he wasn't in uniform. It was the first day of the new year, which meant that most of the new students hadn't yet collected their uniforms from the on-campus store, so he was hardly the only one wearing colours other than red, white, navy, and grey. None of the others were getting the same looks he was. That wasn't unusual. He couldn't remember a time he hadn't gotten that look just about anywhere he went. It could be the corner store where he had been shopping with his dad for literally his entire life - well, with his mother first, then with his father after she had died, and now with Carole - and he would still feel everyone's eyes on him, burning into him...then the way they looked at his dad, as though they wanted to ask him where he had gone wrong in raising such a son, how such a sissy could have come from such a strong, masculine guy.

Kurt had wondered that for awhile, but now? Now he was almost 17 and had been this way for as long as he could remember. He'd stopped caring. So he liked things that other boys didn't like - who cared? So he had listened to the Connie Francis album so much it had worn out and he'd needed to buy a new one. So he liked to wear something that wasn't the same boring buttondown shirt, pressed slacks, and a sweater. Time hadn't made the people around him any more accepting, but it had made him care less if they liked him.

Until that moment. As he trudged along the path that ran beside the baseball diamond, watching boys stare at him as he passed, it suddenly occurred to him that he was going to be surrounded entirely by teenage males. Those had never been his biggest fans. The girls at school liked him okay, were always hinting at him that they would like to go out with him, date him, and even if he wasn't particularly interested in any of the ones who asked, at least they were nice to him. They treated him like his differences made him interesting, almost intriguing, like someone with a kind of international, cosmopolitan appeal. The boys at school, on the other hand...

He hoped there wasn't a drive-in across the street from Dalton that sold milkshakes for a dime if you went before 4:30 the way the one across from McKinley did.

A year - possibly two - of being surrounded only by boys who had relatively little supervision did not leave him feeling very optimistic about the year. Maybe the uniform would turn out to be a blessing in disguise, he thought glumly as he trudged up the steps to the second floor of Everett House, dorm to which he had been assigned. Shifting the suitcase into his left hand, he pulled the key and slip of paper out of his pocket with his right hand and fumbled to unfold the paper using only his thumb and first two fingers. Room 207. He checked the numbers on the wall, glanced over his shoulder to make sure his dad had made it up the stairs with the larger suitcase, and strode down the hall with as much fake icy confidence as he could muster. It didn't stop the stares, but no one shoved him into a wall they would have at his old school.

His room was unoccupied, but the suitcase on one bed and a row of uniform pieces hanging neatly in one of the two armoires let him know that his roommate had already arrived and left. He wasn't so sure about this sharing a room bit; his only experience had been with Finn for about a month between when their parents married and when they moved into the current house - the three-bedroom ranch over in one of the newer subdivisions in Lima. That hadn't gone so well. Finn wasn't the cleanest of boys and they had spent an awful lot of time fighting over the fact that yes, clothes should go in a hamper instead of on the floor, even if Carole gathered the garments without a chastising word on laundry day. He wasn't sure sharing with a stranger would go any better. Kurt sighed and hoisted his suitcase onto the bed, flicked open the latches, and began unpacking the contents into the bureau. He had a feeling he was going to need a bigger dresser to fit everything he'd brought.

"I'd offer to help, but I know you've got some system or something for all this," Burt offered as he set down the second suitcase, and Kurt just nodded. "They've got a thing for the parents now, some kind of talk and then a reception. You okay here for now?"

In truth, Kurt wasn't sure. With every shirt he unpacked, every sweater he folded neatly and placed in the bottom drawer, it was becoming more and more real - he was staying here. He wasn't going home, to his nice safe bedroom with his record player and the phone close enough to the door that he could stretch the cord around into his room and lie on the bed while he talked to Mercedes. Here he would be stuck standing in line in the hallway with a bunch of boys trying to talk to their girlfriends and make plans for Saturday night every time he wanted to tell her about the next movie they should see or what great tidbit he'd read about Ricky Nelson in a magazine. He had no idea where he would be able to listen to his music; that thought didn't thrill him.

He wanted to tell his dad to skip the orientation and reception and stay here while he unpacked, even if it meant not doing anything productive with the time. He wanted to tell his dad that he could unpack his six sweaters and four shirts, place them back in his suitcase, and they could turn around and go home as if nothing had ever happened. He could work at the shop - he was better at it than Finn by a mile, he'd been doing it most of his life - and read on his own and go back to school when it opened again next year because, if nothing else, the courts would step in and tell them they had to open like they had in Virginia.

Instead he simply replied, "Yeah, Dad, I'll be fine."

"Good. I'll meet you at the big welcome thing in the main building later, okay?"

"Sounds good," Kurt replied with a nod.

And with that his dad was gone, and he was alone in an empty room that was supposed to somehow become his new home. It didn't feel homey at all - cold, stark, white, with boring slab-style furniture and a hardwood floor that looked like it had been trod on by a century's worth of dirty feet without a single scrubbing. He saw a blue rug on the floor over by the other bed; if he'd known he could decorate, he would have done so much more, he would have brought rugs and comforters and curtains...and lamps because he hated this kind of overhead lighting. But sadly that would have to wait; he might be able to bring a few things back the next time he went home, which right now was looking like two or three weekends from now.

He could make it that long, at least. He could handle two or three weeks.

He made quick work of both suitcases, stashing the empty vessels under the bed, and wandered slowly around the room. It wasn't large, maybe 2/3 the side of his bedroom at home and meant for two people instead of just him. Each side had a bed against the side wall, a dresser at the foot of the bed, with two desks along the wall opposite the door just below the window that looked out over the west side of campus. Flanking the door were two armoires...and that was it. There wasn't really room to put any additional furniture, but Kurt felt as though it needed something, or at least a rearrange. Maybe this elusive roommate wouldn't mind - he could ask once they met. After all, the boy had thought to bring a rug, and it coordinated well enough with the darker blue throw blanket at the foot of the bed.

Maybe this wouldn't be entirely bad. Maybe the roommate would be okay, possibly even like some of the same things Kurt did. He doubted it, but it was possible.

He was tempted to snoop a little - not because he was the kind of person who instinctively violated personal privacy, just because the room felt too empty and the silence too loud and the afternoon too long. He glanced at the open armoire - aside from the uniforms, a pair of dark slacks hung there, along with a few button-down shirts, a few with an unfortunate plaid pattern. None of it looked all that different than what Finn's closet contained - a little more blue, but that was probably the only difference. Apparently the guy liked that colour. There was a box on the desk that Kurt didn't dare open - that would be snooping, unlike what he was doing now which was simply looking at items that were already in plain sight.

Like the guitar in the corner.

That was intriguing and a little different. He doubted he and the boy would have anything in common when it came to types of music - he didn't listen to as much on guitar as a lot of people did, most of what he preferred involved full orchestration, but if this elusive roommate of his was also a music fan it might make him easier to convince that one of them should bring in a turntable so they could switch off listening to what they wanted. That might make the year more bearable, at any rate.

Out of things he could look at without venturing into inappropriate, Kurt drew in a deep breath, pocketed his key, and left the room. There was plenty of campus to explore, plenty of areas to familiarize himself with before classes started tomorrow morning. After all, the last thing he wanted was to be late on his very first day at a school that he suspected was extraordinarily strict about technical rules - anywhere with uniforms was bound to be. After a quick loop around Everett House, which revealed nothing except the typicality of his room, he strode out the front door and down the steps. A few boys were tossing a football around on the front lawn but largely ignored him as he passed - refreshing. He walked along the path in the direction of the academic building, knowing that would be the first place he needed to figure out. As he reached the back door of the building, he realized he hadn't thought to bring along a copy of his class schedule - some good that did him. How was he meant to find his classrooms and familiarize himself with the numbering system if he didn't have the timetable with him?

Shaking his head at his own thoughtlessness, Kurt turned to walk back, but noticed that students seemed to be streaming towards him, towards the building, at a surprising rate that was well beyond what one might expect for a day best spent milling about. Curious, he followed the throng. Had he forgotten about one of the scheduled pseudo-mandatory events? Was he late already for some kind of event?

The main building was more magnificent on the inside than out; from the front of the building, it looked like a relatively nondescript preparatory school that was attempting to emulate the classic look of the highly-regarded educational institutions in New England. Once Kurt stepped inside, though, he was taken aback by the art that seemed to be everywhere. Rather than walls covered in lockers as he was used to, he saw paintings and portraits on almost every surface, with polished wood accents that highlighted the geographic features. It was like going to school in an art gallery - even if visual art had never been his primary area of expertise or expression, he could appreciate what it said about the school, how different it looked from anything he'd envisioned.

That was before he made his way through a hallway with walls painted in their own mural. Students walked past, blase, as though this was something they were completely used to - halls that looked like a rococo Michaelangelo had been let loose and just done with it what he wanted. He couldn't even imagine- He was so distracted looking up that he accidentally ran into the tufted leather wingback chair. What kind of school had tufted leather wingbacks in a hallway?

Probably the same kind that had a grand staircase leading from the main level to the basement, he supposed as he got there. There was a large domed window overhead, and he wondered how he had managed to miss seeing it from the outside - wouldn't he have noticed what looked like a gothic bubble sticking up from the ground like that? If it was even in the front of the school; he had no idea where he was by now, still following the seemingly endless gaggle of students all heading the same direction. The marble stairs were slick, and he cheated close to the railing as he moved a little slower. He wasn't looking forward to trying them for the first time in the new uniform loafers, even if no one else seemed remotely fazed by it. He looked around, wide-eyed, trying to look inconspicuous but finding it next to impossible as he took in the grandeur of it all.

He should figure out where they were going. Everyone just kept streaming into the basement, passing him quickly on the stairs - they all knew where they were going, that much was obvious. They seemed excited by it, and as much as he kind of wanted to just walk along with them and see what the fuss was, a part of him felt like this might be some kind of returning-students thing. None of the other kids he'd seen out of uniform before seemed to be following the crowd - just him and a thousand boys in navy blazers.

"Excuse me?" he asked to no one in particular, wondering if anyone would even hear him above the excited jostling of old friends being reunited after a summer apart. The boy in front of him stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned to look up at him. "Um, hi. Can I ask you a question? I'm new here." He felt like it was the most obvious statement he could have possibly made, standing there in his own clothes and looking lost despite his best efforts to appear inconspicuous.

The boy's left hand was clutched around the strap of his brown leather satchel, but he extended his right and introduced himself. "My name's Blaine."

That hadn't been the response he was expecting - at McKinley if you asked if you could ask someone a question because you didn't know where you were going or what you were meant to be doing, in the best case scenario you got a polite response from one of the girls with a fake smile and too much blush; in most cases, the response was much shorter, less informative, and probably contained an expletive of some kind. "Kurt," he replied shakily. Glancing sideways at the boys who continued to pass - but who seemed to thankfully have the good sense to keep a bit wider berth at the bottom of the stairs rather than plowing right into this Blaine like would have happened at his old school - he asked, "So what exactly is going on?"

Blaine's face broke into an enthusiastic grin. "The Warblers." He'd heard of them, he remembered that much, he knew it was in one of the brochures, or maybe on the official list of school-sanctioned extracurriculars. They were...one of the choirs, that much was obvious. The acappella one? He thought so. Possibly. "Every now and then they throw an impromptu performance in the Senior Commons, it tends to shut the school down for awhile." Blaine kept glancing to the side, in the direction the group was going, like he was trying to make sure he wouldn't accidentally miss the performance as a result of talking to the clueless new kid. A couple of the guys nodded in his direction and he gave a little flick of his head in response, but he didn't try to excuse himself.

Kurt wasn't sure what that even meant. "So, wait - the glee club here is kind of cool?" Surely all of these boys couldn't be moving so enthusiastically to see one of the choirs. He was used to feeling lucky if he didn't get things thrown at him when he performed. To say that the population of Lima was not exceptionally interested in the arts would be a gross understatement; if anything, they tended to take a certain perverse pleasure in tormenting people who enjoyed any form of artistic expression even beyond what they otherwise would have done.

Even so, he missed it already. He missed his glee club, he missed the closest thing he had to a niche at McKinley. He missed getting up on stage and singing about something - anything - to let out all the emotion he was holding back. He missed the people. God only knew why; most of them weren't people he would have chosen to hang out with anyway, but until or unless Mercedes was allowed to join him at school they were the closest to a safe place he was going to get. Even if he would never get a solo. Even if they made fun of his penchant for music sung by incredible female artists - or, as they insisted on putting it, "girl songs." It was still better than the rest of the day. He thought of the six of them now, back in Lima, with no real creative outlet until or unless the school opened back up - Finn, his girlfriend Quinn, Puck and Sandy Lopez who would just spend the entire year making out in the absence of anywhere concrete they needed to be at a particular time, Brittany would be missing Cheerios more than music, and Rachel...well, it was a good thing she was in so many creative activities outside of school, so many lessons and community theater groups, otherwise she would be going completely crazy.

He couldn't imagine the looks on their faces when he told them there was a place that people actually flocked to see the glee club performing.

Blaine grinned as he stated proudly, "The Warblers are like Elvis."

"They perform obscene pelvic movements that upset mothers and violate decency standards?" Kurt replied dryly. Oh god, why had he tried to make that joke? Why had he tried to make a joke at all? Why couldn't he ever manage to remember when he was nervous that no one thought he was funny?

Blaine laughed - laughed! - just a little, a kind of quiet chuckle like he hadn't been expecting that response but thought it was great.

No one ever laughed at his jokes - or at him, in a good way. Usually he ended up forcing an awkward, nervous laugh or grin that left everyone else silent and staring at him like he was either crazy or unfailingly stupid, and in either event they weren't sure whether or not to humour him. But Blaine seemed to genuinely find the comment amusing.

"Not quite. But c'mon - I'll show you." Blaine's hand reached out to grasp Kurt's, and he felt for a moment like he had stopped breathing. No one really touched him much - his dad occasionally, Carole now, Mrs. Jones was the kind of mother (or surrogate mother, in his case) who liked hugs, and he and Mercedes weren't shy around each other, but the kind of casual, day-to-day, nonchalant touching that he saw his peers engage in had always eluded him. The boys would pat each other on the back after a good play or cuff each other's arm or sling an arm around a friend's shoulder when trying to appear casual...but never with him. None of them were friendly enough with him for that; no one wanted to associate with the resident sissy. The girls were a little better, but most of them said things about not wanting to give their boyfriends the wrong idea and kind of refrained.

Blaine hadn't even hesitated. Before Kurt could collect his thoughts, Blaine was leading him down a hallway, then a left, then through another mural-covered room with dark wood wainscoting and leather-upholstered furniture. It was like everything faded away in that moment except the sound of two pairs of footsteps running along the elegantly-tiled floor, the blur of dark colours and stark bright light of windows in his peripheral vision, and the feeling of Blaine's warm, strong hand clasped around his. It felt rougher than his but not as rough as the guys who worked in the shop, not dry but not clammy, square and muscular and powerful, and the sensation of it squeezing his own smaller, smoother hand sent a rush of excitement through him, like he didn't know precisely where Blaine was taking him but wanted to follow him anyway - wherever it was.

The moment ended too quickly as Blaine dropped his hand to push open an enormous pair of double doors to reveal a bright room packed with students. The light wood paneling reflected the light from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and Kurt had to wonder how it was so light down here because he could have sworn they should be underground by now - he came in on the main floor, he thought, and then took the stairs down...was it some kind of strange split-level thing where he had come in on the second floor and made his way down to ground-level? Who were all these kids - all students? All seniors? Because there were a lot of them but this couldn't possibly be the entire school's worth - not judging by the dorms at least.

He was the only one not wearing a uniform, and he felt painfully obtuse as he stood in the doorway. His grey and black jacket, his blue trousers, his gold and blue vest...it was obvious immediately that he didn't belong there. That he was an outsider - an intruder on what was obviously a common ritual around here, judging by the way the boys in varying assortments of red and navy vests, cardigans, and jackets moved chess tables and chairs out of the way. They all knew each other, talking and laughing and comparing what looked like course schedules, swapping stories about summer vacations gone awry and sweet girls they'd met over the break. He remained in the doorway, frozen, and drew in a nervous breath. "I stick out like a sore thumb," he stated on a quivery exhale, cursing himself for not seeming more confident. He was used to seeming like he knew what he was doing even when he didn't, to appearing like nothing bothered him even when it did. He should be better at pretending to fit in here - he needed to be if he wanted to survive even ten minutes in this school where everyone else fit so seamlessly.

"You won't once you get your uniform," Blaine assured him, reaching out to smooth the lapel of his jacket and carefully readjust the bow portion of his tie, straightening it. Kurt knew it was his imagination, but he swore he could feel the warmth of Blaine's fingers through the thin fabric of his shirt, up by his neck, and it sent a kind of warm shiver through his entire body. He offered a nervous smile, and Blaine added "Don't worry, new kid - You'll fit right in," with this confident, winning smile like he genuinely believed it.

With a look like that, Kurt found himself maybe believing it, too.

A group of boys was gathering in front of the window, forming what essentially amounted to a couple mostly-even lines, and Blaine glanced over his shoulder, then nodded. "If you'll excuse me," he said, then turned and handed his bag to a friend as he walked over to join the group as the music [started](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sAHiR0rkJg).

Kurt had heard acapella groups before - his mom used to play old recordings of the Yale Whiffenpoofs while she cleaned the living room sometimes, so he certainly knew what emotional energy and intensity the perfect harmony could invoke. He'd heard doo-wop music on the radio and enjoyed some of it, but this was like a whole other league. They weren't just singing along with the four lines that the original recording had - no, they were singing that plus the instruments - the saxophone, adding in tones where the percussion should be that didn't feel sufficient with just finger snaps. Even the parts that were originally vocals were so much more intricate than the record.

And there were people singing in his range, too. That never happened. He wasn't used to any boys singing like him, but he heard a few clear falsetto "oo-wa-oo-wa"s - and they sounded right. They didn't sound like at McKinley, when it constantly sounded like he was trying too hard and he had to convince people that that was just what his voice naturally did. That he just sang that high and he wasn't going to try to force it down to make it less obvious because that wasn't who he was. These boys were singing notes usually only he could hit, and no one looked ashamed of it.

He watched as Blaine kind of danced his way around with one of the guys - a boy of average height with slicked-back blond hair that was straight from a peroxide bottle - snapping his fingers and waiting for his part. Just waiting, but with this kind of grin like he knew whatever was coming was going to just blow someone's mind. The lines stopped moving on the first line they all sang together:

Why do fools fall in love?

Then Blaine began his solo, and it took everything in Kurt to not let his jaw drop. His voice wasn't as smooth or high as Frankie Lymon's, but somehow that made the song sound better, less young and ridiculous. Unlike the original singer, Blaine sounded like he was actually old enough to be wondering from personal experience - it wasn't that much lower, probably a third Kurt guessed? But it was just enough to make the version sound completely perfect.

Why do birds sing so gay?  
And lovers await the break of day?  
Why do they fall in love?

To say that Blaine had a charisma when he sang would be the understatement of Kurt's life. He was beyond charming, with this grin like there was nothing Blaine loved more than what he was doing that very moment - singing in front of the school with these boys backing him up. Even though he was side-step-touch-ing like everyone else, he stood out even if he wasn't that much in front of the rest of them. The way he held himself was different, was more genuine somehow even though he looked completely overexaggerated - like a caricature of an enthusiastic singer, complete with rubber-faced mugging.

Why does the rain fall from up above?  
Why do fools fall in love?  
Why do they fall in love?

The feeling he got watching Blaine was familiar and yet indescribable, nothing he could put his finger on precisely or say what it was about Blaine's performance that was causing it. It felt like a warm knot in the pit of his stomach but at the same time like his stomach was weightless and floating up into his chest, leaving a void in its wake. He felt a grin spreading across his face without having any idea why, which was unnerving only because he honestly couldn't remember the last time he had smiled, let alone like this; this was the jubilant grin of a four-year-old who got the toy he wanted on Christmas, times about fifty. He had to remind himself to keep breathing, sucking air roughly through his open mouth. His eyes were wide and awestruck as he watched, and every time Blaine would look in his direction he felt like his stomach had dropped then picked back up again, like the time his dad had coerced him onto a roller coaster at Cedar Point when he was nine only without the sensation that he was going to vomit all over his shoes. And all the while, he had this uncontrollable urge to start laughing, to giggle like he hadn't done since he was easily about five years old, and that was just ridiculous. What was it about this that was so different from any other incredible performance?

And how could he repeat it as often as possible?

Love is a losing game  
Love can be a shame  
I know of a fool, you see  
For that fool is me

The way Blaine punctuated the notes on that last line was accompanied by this little hand gesture, not quite a flick of the wrist but not quite a playful punch, with a wide-eyed mugging expression like it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever admitted to, and Kurt couldn't help himself - a tiny laugh escaped, luckily not loud enough for anyone to hear, and he rolled his eyes at the entire thing. This was crazy - Blaine was crazy and he was making Kurt lose his mind.

Then Blaine hit his high notes.

Tell me why-

Blaine closed his eyes as he floated the note, but not from exertion or oversinging - eyelids fluttering shut, eyebrows raised, with his hand kind of up at jaw-level, like he was so into the moment and nothing except that note and the emotions fueling it existed.

It was the most beautiful, most entrancing thing Kurt had ever seen. He wondered if he'd ever looked like that over a note; he wondered what it would feel like to be so lost in that singular moment like that, if it felt as incredible as Blaine looked like he felt right then.

Tell me why

And then they began an instrumental break - with no instruments. Singing and 'da-da-da-daaaa'-ing where a brass section would be, where a piano would bounce its way through accompaniment, where a bass would pluck along, in such a way that it made Kurt almost wish that there was only vocal accompaniment to songs; every song should sound like this, should have this much technical perfection and musical passion and have every single note be just right like this.

Still, with Blaine not singing for the moment, it was the first chance he'd had to tear his eyes away from the Warblers to look around the room. He was used to his performances with his old glee club, where if he was lucky the crowd was ambivalent and, under most situations, they received a far more hostile welcome. But this audience? They were entirely, completely into it. They were enjoying the performance, most of them bopping along with the music or snapping along in time with where the drum line would go. A few looked coordinated as they did it, but most didn't - a few looked downright ridiculous, including the guy closest to him.

No one cared. No one stared or made fun, just let him dance as ridiculously as he wanted while he cheered the group on.

Everyone (well, except for him) was in their uniform, but somehow they all looked so different. Some looked like Finn, like they played and watched sports every weekend; some seemed like they would be hopeless nerds at any other school but had found a place here - and that place didn't only exist in a library. A few even moved as he did, with short, quick, precise gestures, stood with a hand splayed on their hip or just with their hip jutting out a little bit. And even though he stood out so badly, it was the least like an outsider he had ever felt.

He might fit in here. He might be able to be like these people, these boys. They might not torture him like at his old school.

And if he got to keep listening to Blaine singing, he could definitely be happy here.

Why do birds sing so gay?

As the next verse began, Kurt found himself noticing something else.

They weren't all white.

He didn't know why it hadn't occurred to him earlier, why in the three or so hours he'd been on Dalton's campus he hadn't noticed that, among the many reasons it didn't look anything like McKinley, the fact that there were people of all colours walking and talking and - oh god, probably even rooming - together would be sufficiently huge. And their choir was no different - to one side of Blaine was a black guy, an Asian on the other, with at least three other non-white singers in the group just from Kurt's vantage-point. They were all singing together like it was no big deal.

Maybe to them it wasn't.

The feeling of euphoria almost overwhelmed him, the sense that it really was possible - that people really could feel what he'd known to be true since he was seven. That people in Ohio could genuinely look at a person and see the person and not some dividing line...it seemed so impossible when he was in Lima, when practically anywhere in town he went someone was protesting something having to do with segregation and trying to hold onto the last vestiges of a disgusting system. But here, only two hours away, was an entire room of boys his age who saw nothing queer about it at all.

He couldn't wait to tell Mercedes, to start planning their dream choir together.

And lovers await the break of day?  
Why do they fall in love?

Why does the rain fall from up above?  
Why do fools fall in love?  
Why do they fall in love?

He was so lost in thought that he missed a verse and a half completely, and what brought him back was the realization that Blaine was looking right at him. He wasn't sure how he knew, he hadn't been paying attention, but it was like all of a sudden he could feel the boy staring at him, singing in his direction. He felt his cheeks grow hot and tingly, and he cringed how red he knew he was - he turned pink if he even thought about feeling something, let alone this...whatever this was.

Why does my heart  
Skip a crazy beat?

Blaine sang directly at Kurt, like he was waiting to finish the song until Kurt could answer the question. He didn't know - he didn't know why his own heart felt like it was fluttering in his chest and pounding in his ears all at the same time, why he couldn't do anything but grin like a lunatic whenever he met Blaine's gaze.

For I know-

and Blaine did a little spin that made everyone else kind of roll their eyes, which made Kurt think he either did that a lot or had a history of falling when he tried; he wasn't sure which version he liked better.

It will reach defeat  
Tell me why-

That same magical moment happened for a second time, just as entrancing as the first, but with a pleading motion this time - knees bent, hands in a praying pose, eyes skyward, waiting desperately for an answer.

Tell me why  
Why do fools fall in love?

The song ended with Blaine's gaze rooted firmly on Kurt, and all he could do was clap so quickly and enthusiastically he thought his hands might snap off at the wrist. He was almost laughing on every heaving exhale, feeling so good for no concrete reason he could identify. He'd seen people perform well before, it shouldn't be this big of a deal. Even with the heady combination of the knowledge that some places weren't Lima, and the hope for the entire future of the world, and the...whatever this was that Blaine was stoking within him...it shouldn't have felt this overwhelming and amazing.

His father's hand clapped on his shoulder brought him back to reality, grounded him a little, but couldn't wipe the grin off his face. "I think you should be okay here - see? They sing girl songs like you do."

Glancing around, he saw that a few parents had started filtering in around the edges of the room; their meeting or reception or whatever must have just ended and they came to see what the commotion was about. His smile faded slowly as he responded, "It's not a girl song."

"I've heard it on the radio, that girl sings it."

"It's Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, they're all boys."

"Even better for you, right? With the high voice like that?"

Kurt supposed it was, and he appreciated that his father was trying to encourage him and didn't try to tell him to change who he was or how he sang - and never had. But at the moment, he was a little more preoccupied with trying to figure out where the mystically intriguing lead singer had vanished to and how he could find him again.


	2. Chapter 2

They were the last family left in the parking lot. Kurt shouldn't have been entirely surprised - he wasn't exactly looking forward to the moment his dad would get into the truck and pull away down the long driveway towards the freshly-paved road on which the school sat - but something about the way his dad checked the truck for the third time "to make sure we didn't forget anything" made him realize just how much the two of them were used to each other. Had relied on each other over the years. Even with Mrs. Jones always around, and Mercedes of course, he and his dad had been each other's support since his mom died, and now he was going to just be here by himself.

It was unnerving to say the least.

He knew logically that the day would come; after all, he had been planning on moving to New York the moment he graduated from high school for as long as he could remember. This was just suddenly too soon, was all.

"Well," Burt said, jaw tight, lips pressed together tightly. He adjusted his tie awkwardly - an article of clothing he never wore by choice and had donned only because he wanted to make sure Kurt made a good impression at this new fancy school of his - and looked forlornly at the truck. "I think you got everything."

Kurt nodded and drew in a slow deep breath. "I think so," he confirmed.

"If you forgot anything back home, let me know and I'll run it up. Or we can get you one of those weekend pass things."

"They don't usually give them in the first month except when there's an emergency. Something about making sure we settle in," Kurt replied. His plans of going back in two weeks had been firmly dashed at the orientation session. 

"Oh," Burt said, wondering what else there was to say to that. "Then I guess call if you need anything and I'll bring it." He dug into the pocket of his trousers and pressed a roll of dimes into Kurt's hand. "Anytime, you got it? Even if you don't need something."

Kurt's fingers tightened around the cylinder and his fingertips dug at the paper wrapper. "Okay," he confirmed, feeling his eyes start to sting. Even though his father was the one person who had never tried to tell him it wasn't okay to cry, it still felt so ridiculous. Embarrassing. Here he was at a great school surrounded by boys who seemed all right, and he was crying in the parking lot because he didn't want his dad to leave. No wonder everyone called him a sissy. 

His dad drew him into a tight hug, which he returned, and mumbled, "Love you, kid. 'M proud of you."

That broke his resolve completely and the tears fell as he whispered "Love you too, Dad."

"You, um." Burt pulled back and cleared his throat. "You take care of yourself, you got that? Make sure you're eating and all that since no one's here to pester you about it."

"Got it," he promised.

With an almost herculean effort, Burt stepped away, then turned and walked the few remaining feet to his truck. Kurt hastily batted his tears away with the back of his hand, the roll of change to call home with still clenched in his fist.

He would be okay, he knew that. It just seemed so lonely. So strange, not having his dad right down the hall in case anything happened - not that anything would, he'd just gotten used to it.

After taking a moment to calm himself, he turned and slowly began to walk back to his new home. The sun was beginning to set over the grove of trees, casting a pinkish glow over the unnamed stream of water that was too small to be considered a river, but that ran all the way through town and cut across the edge of main campus. It really was a beautiful place, he thought with a kind of sad, resigned consolatory feeling. The campus was incredible, and every person he'd met had seemed genuinely nice, and the food seemed okay, and his room wasn't disgusting, and maybe he could make all of this work out well. Maybe he would even like it better than the alternatives - he had never been fond of McKinley, after all, and the people here seemed kind and interesting and worldly. He bet some of them had even flown on planes before.

"Are you lost?" A familiar voice snapped him from his reverie as he saw Blaine half-jogging towards him. 

"What? Oh, no, I was just saying goodbye to my dad in the parking lot, and now...what are you doing out here?" And so disheveled? Kurt wanted to add. Blaine's jacket was over one arm, his shirt sleeves rolled up messily, his tie askew. Only his hair seemed in perfect order, held immobile by the large quantity of Brylcreme.

"I was helping some of the boys from Crew move the shell back," Blaine replied as he reached up to brush some sweat away from the back of his neck. He seemed to perpetually wear that smile, Kurt realized, whether his mouth was upturned or not - there was something in his eyes that just always seemed to be, well...smiling at him. He wasn't used to that. He was used to guys like Finn, who seemed perpetually kind of disinterested and occasionally downright annoyed. This was new, and though he couldn't precisely identify why, he knew that he liked it. "they had a talk for potential new recruits and brought it out to demonstrate. Do you row?"

"No," Kurt replied simply. He wasn't sure what about him suggested he might even have considered it before. 

"Oh." Blaine's open expression seemed to close off a little at the short negative reply.

That wasn't what he wanted, not at all. He wanted Blaine to keep talking. He wanted to keep seeing that look. "Do you?" he asked with as interested expression as he could muster.

"No. I used to. I can't now, though, it conflicts with cross country," Blaine replied. 

"You run?" Kurt asked.

Blaine nodded. "Ten miles every morning but Sunday. More on Saturday if I don't have too much work to get done. This is my favourite place in the mornings, it's so peaceful and..."

"Beautiful," Kurt supplied softly.

Blaine grinned. "Exactly." He turned to stare out over the pink-tinged water, and Kurt did the same so that they were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the edge of Blaine's jacket occasionally brushing Kurt's hand where it draped over the crook of Blaine's elbow. "You should try it sometime."

"I might." Kurt hesitated, then - in absence of anything else to say to keep the conversation going, added, "You were amazing."

"What? Oh - thanks," Blaine smiled again, but it seemed almost shy. Almost. More like Kurt's praise ruined the moment somehow by making it about him, though Kurt wasn't sure how or why. "We should get back, it's starting to get dark and the campus is hard enough to navigate when it's all new. Want me to walk you?"

Kurt found himself grinning at the prospect. Realizing that was probably a little too enthusiastic a response just for an offer to help make sure he didn't get lost in the woods somewhere never to be found again, he tried to look a little more subdued as he replied, "Sure. If it's not out of your way."

"Oh, it's no problem," Blaine assured him. "All the dorms are pretty close together. What year are you?"

"Junior," Kurt replied as they started walking. 

"Ahh, Everett - I remember it well," Blaine said with a fond kind of grin like there were so many stories he could never repeat that had taken place in those hallowed halls. Which meant Blaine was a senior, too - good to know. He wasn't sure what use that information was, but it seemed like something useful. "So what brings you to Dalton?"

"It's a great school," Kurt offered simply. It was the explanation he preferred to give until he knew someone. He'd made the mistake too many times of trying to express his outrage over his town's backwards ways, only to discover that the person he was talking to had no more sympathy for his perspective than the idiot next door who referred to Mercedes as a thief whenever she was in the neighbourhood (and that was, Kurt was absolutely certain, the nicest thing he could think of to call her). He didn't hide how he felt about all of it, about the ridiculous assumptions and the downright offensive words; he didn't smooth himself over and avoid Mercedes in public - almost the opposite. But there were times it was just easier to not delve into the entire lengthy history of just how screwed-up the people he knew were.

Only he wouldn't have to worry about that here.

The image of the Warblers, all singing together without anyone in that room caring that there were non-white people standing next to white people. That, when they finished and all clapped each other on the back in hearty congratulations, boys of different races touched each other and no one went to go wash their hands or scrub down their uniforms because they knew it didn't matter. They knew that the people who said it did were just ignorant.

He knew other schools weren't like his; for one thing, only a few schools in Ohio had been shut down over the issue, but it seemed like every school at least made a fuss about it. There were protesters, or surges in violence, or death threats...but not here.

This was how it was supposed to be.

He felt an unexpected swell of emotion, of pride but also of...anger. Frustration. Resentment. He had to leave his best friend behind to find this? His best friend, who needed this more than he did? He had to run away to somewhere else because his town was so bigoted that they would literally rather have no one in the city limits get an education than see Mercedes walk into a classroom? 

"Yeah, but there are a lot of great schools around here - why here?" Blaine asked, then looked over and saw the expression on Kurt's face, the threatening tears, the tightness around his mouth. "What's wrong?" he asked, concerned.

"Can I-" Kurt swallowed to steady his voice and continued, "-ask you a question?"

"Sure," Blaine replied. "Whatever you want."

"All the guys in the Warblers, they really...don't care when people are-" He struggled to find a way of saying it that wouldn't make him sound like a racist jerk, like he thought it should matter. He knew it shouldn't, except it did to everyone around him. "...different?"

Blaine blinked, confused. "We're all different. Only the uniforms are the same," he added, trying to joke. "I'm sorry, I don't think I know what you mean."

"You and all the boys. No one acted like any of them were any different, not even the two on either side of you."

Blaine thought a moment about who had been standing near him. "You mean Wes and David?" he asked, eyebrows knitting together.

"Maybe. I don't know anyone's names yet."

"If you're asking what I think you're asking, then the answer is yes - they're part of the group and no, no one cares. Dalton integrated voluntarily back in the 1920s and we have a strict non-harassment policy. Anyone who comes here and tries to say something about it doesn't last long. Everyone is treated the same. Everyone is equal. It's as simple as that."

Kurt's mouth tightened further as his eyes started to burn. As simple as that? He couldn't imagine such a thing. He couldn't fathom a world where everyone knew what he'd been feeling since he was- well, forever, really, but certainly since he was 7. A school that had known it back around the time his father had been a child? 

"I take it things were different at your old school," Blaine offered gently.

"My best friend Mercedes...we were supposed to be able to go to school together this year. We'd been looking forward to it for months - years, really, but it was real a few months ago, and now the school has closed its doors because she and her friends will apparently somehow damage the rest of the people I know. And I can't-...I try to let it not bother me, to stand up when I can, but listening to people talk about her like that is..." He shook his head, lacking the words to express how simultaneously frustrating and heart-wrenching it was. Knowing that legislatures literally sat and debated the pseudo-scientific reports to try to figure out which was more damaging: telling someone they were worth less than any other human being for something they couldn't help, or 'forcing' the rest of the town to acknowledge that not all people were exactly the same. Knowing that everyone was pretty much at the mercy of people with this deeply-ingrained and completely illogical discomfort and out-right hatred until they all died out.

How had these people avoided that? Dalton was incredible, but it was only a high school. He could remember hearing comments starting-...well probably about the same time people had started calling him names for not being like other boys. It all started so early, how had these boys (and their families) never had that part ingrained in them, too?

Blaine nodded and placed his hand on Kurt's shoulder. "I understand," he said with a sad smile. Kurt wanted to believe it - he really did - but in his entire life, very few people who had said that to him had actually understood. "The school I went to before this was...not nearly so accepting," he offered, his voice taking on a kind of halting quality as if not sounding hurt took too much energy to keep his sentences flowing. "I'm part-Pinoy."

"What's that?"

"About half my family's from the Philippines," he explained. "I don't look it, neither does my dad really, but most of my cousins... I can pass for white, for 'normal,' but they can't. Listening to people at my old school talk about everyone who wasn't pale to a certain level really..." Over the course of the few sentences, the smile melted out of his gaze, replaced by something more genuine, sadder. Worry. Guilt. Regret. His jaw was tight, and he gave a quick shake of his head. 

"Did they know about you?" Kurt asked quietly.

Blaine licked his lips and hesitated a moment before he ground out a simple, "No." He hesitated, then added, "Only a few people here do because it doesn't matter. Wes saw one of my family photos once and joked that I must be adopted. At my old school, no one knew because I chose not to let anyone. Here, I don't tell people because it doesn't make a difference. It's a lot better here." They ascended the front steps of Everett House and Blaine held open the door, allowing Kurt to enter first, and suddenly the vulnerability and regret Kurt had seen too briefly in Blaine's eyes was gone, replaced by that constant-smile look. It suddenly seemed so much more hollow than it had a few minutes ago. "Which room are you in?"

"207," Kurt replied, pausing a moment to remember which direction the stairs were from here, but Blaine grabbed his hand and led him. "Or I could just follow you."

Blaine grinned. "We encourage people to listen to upperclassmen around here, especially the new kids," he joked. "Let's see, now I was down that way," he pointed to the left, "in 224 last year, so you'd be down this way-" He led Kurt to the right, which surely enough was the correct direction. 

As they approached the room, the door was open and Kurt could see someone hunched over the desk on the side of the room with the blue rug. Apparently his roommate had returned. He felt a nervous tightening in his stomach; he was stuck with this boy, whoever he was, whatever he liked, whatever views he might hold...there was no getting away from him. Kurt had only really experienced that once before, with Finn, which hadn't gone so well in the beginning, and he didn't exactly relish the idea of doing it without at least his father to step in and play referee. Though it did make him feel a little better that, at the very least, he wasn't going to have to hide photos of the important people in his life for fear that this boy would make a crack about the Joneses, that wasn't at all the only area of his life that he'd been teased over. What if the boy was one of the athletic types who had stared at him and called him a girl from the time he was five? Or one of the guys who liked to go sneak alcohol every weekend and would come home completely drunk long after curfew? 

"Hey, Sam!" Blaine said brightly, and the roommate's head jerked up. He looked like he could be the blond guy Blaine had been dancing with at the beginning of the performance in the Commons, though at this point Kurt had seen so many boys in identical clothes that he was beginning to have no idea who was who anymore. Obviously Blaine knew him, in any event. "You're rooming with Sam?" he asked, turning to Kurt.

Kurt wasn't sure how precisely to answer that. "If this is Sam, and Sam isn't coopting someone else's desk, then I suppose I am."

"Oh - that's your stuff over there?" Sam asked, turning in his desk chair to face them at the door. The peroxide-platinum was a few shades lighter than Kurt would have chosen for the boy's hair, it washed him out a little too much. Even so, anyone who spent that much time and effort on his own appearance was probably someone he could handle rooming with and who either wouldn't mock the regime de beaute that consumed at least an hour of Kurt's day...or would at least know enough to keep his mouth shut around other people who would make it an issue. Sam removed the dark hornrimmed glasses he was wearing and tossed them absently on his desk, blinked a few times quickly, and fixed Kurt with a vaguely curious look.

"Yes." Kurt crossed the room to extend his hand. "Kurt Hummel."

"Sam Evans." The handshake was firm, if a little confused, with broad hands and slightly-rough fingers in a way Kurt wouldn't have expected from a boy his age at a prep school. 

"Sam's in Warblers," Blaine offered from his place still in the doorway. "Speaking of which: Nick said he can do English at 6 on Wednesdays, so Jeff was going to switch to Thursday at lunch if that's okay."

"Sure," Sam replied with a nervous half-smile. "Whenever works for them, y'know?"

"Planning something fun?" Kurt asked brightly.

"Not exactly." Sam's eyes flicked down towards the already-full desk.

"Sam's on probation," Blaine explained with an apologetic glance to the fellow-Warbler. "Another semester without picking his grades up and we have to kick him out. We don't want to, so all of us are getting together to help him. He's the only reason I passed physics last year, and he hadn't even taken it yet because it's a Junior class, but something about tests..."

"Screws me up every time," Sam filled in.

"Not this year," Blaine stated with a confident smile. "We'll make sure of it." The look from Blaine seemed to be at least a little reassuring to Sam, Kurt saw, and he found himself feeling almost...irritated by it in a way he couldn't explain without feeling like a jerk. Blaine was a nice guy; he was smiling at someone who also seemed like a perfectly nice guy who felt self-conscious about having trouble in class at a school where that was taken seriously. What about that should have him feeling this way? Why did he feel jealous over it, as if he had any claim to the reassuring, confident look? The closest thing he could compare it to was when Mercedes used to talk about her best friend at school and he felt - irrationally and for about five seconds - like the girl would somehow take his place in Mercedes' life. Or like a more mild version of what he felt when his dad and Finn would go to football games on the weekends sometimes.

That didn't make any sense. He'd known them for practically his whole life. He'd known Blaine for maybe three hours. Why would he be jealous over-

"I'll see you later - 3:00 rehearsal tomorrow," Blaine added for Sam as he headed out of the room and, one could assume, back to his own dorm.

Kurt sat stiffly on the edge of his bed, crossing his legs at the knees. "So," Sam said slowly.

"Yes?"

"...I dunno, I'm not really good at this," Sam offered with a sheepish grin. 

"I've never tried," Kurt allowed. Smalltalk had never been his strong suit, and he tended to get nervous around new people and knew that the last thing he should do was tr to use humour. That never served him as well as he expected it to. "So you're a Warbler."

"Yeah," Sam replied. "You sing?"

"Oh, definitely," Kurt replied enthusiastically. "I was in my old school's glee club, but I've been singing practically since I was born. Or so my father claims when he tells me to turn it down and I tell him I have to practice."

"You should audition," Sam urged. 

"Maybe." They were amazing, and the technical challenge of the type of music they performed was intriguing; he couldn't remember the last time music had challenged him. The amount of concentration it would take to stay perfectly on pitch in the middle of an eight-part harmony invigorated him, and he found himself smiling at the thought. "Probably," he amended, but the grin he wore meant 'definitely.' 

"Yeah?" Sam smiled. "Neat." Glancing back at the desk and the mountain of work he already had - and classes hadn't even started yet - he asked, "You know anything about history?"

"Some," Kurt replied. "It's not my best, but not my worst."

"What's your best?"

"Languages," he said confidently. From the time he'd found his mother's old french text book behind the photo albums when he was nine, he'd been obsessed; now he could understand most of what Edith Piaf sang by about his third listen; not bad considering McKinley offered only Greek and Latin due to budget cuts. He'd always caught on much more quickly than his classmates in his Greek class and was the only student in McKinley history to be permitted to take both courses at the same time.

"Really?" Sam asked, eyes lighting up. "Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo." When Kurt just stared at him, eyes wide with a skeptically-raised brow, Sam's face fell. "This is why the guys say I'll never get a girlfriend," he mumbled.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple harsh slurs used in passing in this part.

The morning of the first day of classes passed in a blur of information overload. The first day of the year at McKinley, teachers always spent most of the time going over rules, handing out books, and giving a broad overview of the year's curriculum; here, the teachers assumed you knew the rules already, could read a syllabus, and didn't need to spend twenty minutes to pass a book down the row before you could delve right into the substance. It had been four hours and Kurt already felt hopelessly behind the curve. He could catch up to where they were  _now_ , he was certain, but by the time he got there they would have moved on already.  
  
Finn was either spending the morning sleeping in and watching television, or at the shop changing tires. Kurt would have gladly taken either of those two options. Why did he have to be the son on whom all these extra hopes and dreams were pinned? What kind of stupid idea had this been, anyway?  
  
He had brought it on himself, he knew that - always being the overachiever, the crazy one who actually enjoyed the learning portion of school (while trying to avoid everything else that went with it), had always talked about leaving town one day to go to college which was practically unheard-of in Lima. That he wanted to leave the  _state_  was just baffling to most people - why would he want to go so far from home like that? But his dad knew, and his dad had always supported him the best he knew how, and so here he was: surrounded by a bunch of boys in ugly wool jackets who made the former academic star of McKinley look like a dumb backwater hick.  
  
This was going to be harder than he thought.  
  
By the time he got to lunch, he realized his bigger problem: He didn't know anyone here.  
  
He had known that before, obviously, but it suddenly struck him as he watched the groups of guys chatting happily with people they'd known for years. He didn't know anyone here, and unlike at his old school where he knew exactly who to avoid and where to sit if he wanted to get himself killed, he didn't have any such social education here. And here he couldn't even make sweeping judgments about which cliques were seated where based on attire and appearance - everyone was dressed the same. There were no letter sweaters to tell him where the athletes were so he could stay away, no cheerleading uniforms to let him know who he could get in good with but would ultimately be stabbed in the back by, no socially-unacceptable clothing to shine like a beacon over the nerds, whom Kurt generally found to be a hopeless-but-safe crowd; painfully uninteresting on most topics, and he usually had to fight the urge to leap across the table and force them into better shirts, but at least they didn't beat him up after class.  
  
On the plus side, the food did look much better here. It actually resembled food, and the word 'mystery' could not be associated with any of the meat dish options.   
  
Carefully balancing his tray on his stack of four enormous books, he walked slowly through the dining hall and tried to find an empty seat at the long tables, just hoping he wouldn't sit anywhere that would end up getting him killed. He was used to keeping an extra change of clothes in his locker for when people threw food at him, but now he would need to go all the way back to his room to change and he wasn't sure he had that kind of time. He saw a boy from his French class over there - was he one of the boys who had smiled? Kurt couldn't remember, he looked a lot like one of the other boys who had given a more unreadable expression, and there were just too damned many to-  
  
"Hey, Kurt!" a cheerful voice called from a few seats over. "Come sit with us."  
  
Kurt turned his head quickly towards the source of the sound and found himself staring into Blaine's kind eyes, and a wave of relief washed over him. Blaine not only would give him a place to sit today, but could give him the low-down on everyone else and where he should avoid sitting tomorrow since he doubted that Mister Popular would want him cramping his style every day like this.   
  
Even if he wouldn't have complained about sitting with Blaine anytime he wanted.  
  
Blaine nodded towards the empty seat beside him, and Kurt smiled as he slid into it with as much grace as he could muster. "Well, you survived half of your first day," he joked with a playful nudge of Kurt's shoulder. "How are you holding up?"  
  
He tried to come up with the right expression of how the day had gone, something witty and erudite with just enough haughtiness to keep from appearing scared or overwhelmed. What he came up with instead was, "Why don't any of you have books?"  
  
Lovely.  
  
The boys within earshot chuckled goodnaturedly. "We tend to drop them in the Student Activities Office," Blaine replied. "The Warblers' space isn't large, but it's enough for our books."  
  
"Not when everyone does it," one of the boys pointed out irritatedly.  
  
"Ignore Wes - he's been uptight since we elected him," another boy pointed out from Kurt's other side.   
  
"He's been uptight since he was born," a third guy grumbled.   
  
Blaine smiled good-naturedly and offered, "Kurt, meet about 75% of the Warblers." He went around the table, and Kurt knew he wouldn't remember most of the names, though he did remember a few from Blaine mentioning them before - Wes and David, Jeff and Nick whom he remembered (he thought) from Blaine talking with Sam about tutoring sessions... "Everyone, this is Kurt. He used to go to school in Lima - he's Sam's roommate this year."  
  
"Where is Sam, anyway?" Nick asked.  
  
Blaine thought a moment as he speared a piece of broccoli with his fork. "History with Eric," he replied.  
  
"You have an encyclopedic knowledge of his study schedule?" Kurt asked skeptically.  
  
"He's kind of a freak like that," Jeff (or was it Nick? The one whose hair was almost as fake in its blondness as Sam's) stated.  
  
"Don't worry, you'll find it endearing after awhile," the other one of Jeff-and-Nick assured him with a grin.  
  
A lengthy colloquy about the merits of Blaine as an unofficial leader was cut off quickly as Wes tried to point out that they  _had_  an  _actual_  leader whom they chose not to listen to more often than not, and before long Kurt felt like his head was spinning as he tried to keep up with four people making inside jokes at once. The boys' laughter was genuine, friendly, but he couldn't help but feel like a complete outsider. Between long rehearsals, performances, a week-long leadership camp in Pennsylvania, and at least a few parties where apparently the Warblers let their metaphorical hair down a little, they all knew each other so well, and he barely knew any of their names.   
  
He'd never really been good with groups. Not that he had much experience trying - the closest he came was glee club, and even then they tended to stick to their own cliques by and large. He and Rachel ended up talking a little on the side while Finn and Puck tried to make out with all three Cheerios at once, then they sang for awhile, then they went their separate ways. Trying to keep up with all of them and find anywhere he could say anything useful was daunting.  
  
"Don't worry," came Blaine's voice softly in his ear, and his eyes widened at the sensation of the boy's warm breath on his neck. "I was intimidated when I first met the group, too. You'll catch up - they're all pretty great." Blaine might have kept speaking after that, but all Kurt could focus on was the hot flush spreading from the breath-sensitive place on his neck up into his cheeks and down onto his chest, the tingly, quivery feeling in the pit of his stomach, the warm stirring sensation in-  
  
Oh god. Could this day get any worse without adding embarrassment on top of general cluelessness?  
  
He crossed his left leg tightly over his right, the squeezing sensation abating the involuntary biological response. He simply nodded and offered a small smile, eyes still wide as he replied, "Thanks. For such a small school, there are a lot of people to meet in one day."  
  
Blaine grinned. "I know exactly how you feel, believe me. You'll catch up soon." He gave Kurt's shoulder a playful squeeze, then ducked as Jeff tossed a roll in- was it Thad? - Thad's general direction.  
  
* * * * *  
  
By the end of his first day, Kurt knew exactly three things for certain:  
  
First, whatever the label said, there was no way that jacket was 100% merino wool. It didn't breathe nearly enough, and he had a distinct feeling that the lining wasn't the only culprit. He also had a hunch that he and the local drycleaner would be on very good terms before the semester was over. He felt grungy and sweat-stained by the time he finished classes for the day and doubted that would change as he got more used to the uniform.  
  
Second, his reaction at the table was as confusing as it was unexpected, which was to say  _very_. Obviously he'd had that happen before - he was 16 after all - but never really as a result of other  _people_. Because of dreams (that he could never remember), sure, and first thing in the morning pretty much every morning for a few years now. But this was...  
  
It wasn't entirely the first time, on second thought. Not if he was being completely honest with himself. A couple times back at the beginning of Freshman year, right after he and Finn had met, when Finn would kind of cuff him playfully on the arm or the one time he just grinned, and that-...that had started, and it was embarrassing, but at that point it happened pretty often during the day without any warning or provocation whatsoever. That particular facet of adolescence had finally (thankfully!) died down.  
  
Only now it seemed to be back.  
  
Though...to be perfectly fair...most of the things his dad had tried to warn him were going to happen were starting up again. When he was 12, his dad had pulled him aside for a horribly awkward afternoon of talking about the things his body was going to start doing - hitting growth spurts, his voice dropping, hair growing, and something referred to by his father only as a hand gesture and the words 'all that stuff.' It wasn't much more explanation than he had gotten from the boys' gym teacher a few months earlier and was surprisingly more awkward. The summer between eighth and ninth grades most of it started, then stopped abruptly by Christmas break when he was 14, leaving him a good head shorter than all of his classmates, with a voice that still sounded like a girl's - but at least the constant mildly pleasurable tingling in his crotch had died down, too.   
  
He'd grown three inches over the summer, his range was starting to narrow and move downward - he had to struggle to hit the high F that had once come so easily to him...maybe 'all that stuff' was starting up again. Wouldn't that be great? A new school where no one knew him, and here he was - looking like a barely-pubescent teenager with no self control.   
  
Okay, fine. So the second thing he knew was that apparently changes were starting up again and hormones were going to make his life miserable for at least his first semester at a brand new school.  
  
Third, the library closed at 10. He knew because Sam showed up at precisely 10:12, loaded down with books and looking tired but accomplished. "Hey." He set the books down heavily on his desk and slung his bag to the ground.  
  
"Hello," Kurt replied politely. His own stack of homework wasn't quite finished - he'd spent too much time dwelling on things and not enough time actually getting work done. He was still used to McKinley-level work, which required maybe an hour a night and never started before the second week of classes. "Get a lot done?"  
  
"Quite a bit," Sam confirmed. He flipped through a notebook and retrieved a sheet of yellow paper, which he set on top of Kurt's notebook.  
  
"What's this?"  
  
"Warblers audition information." When Kurt looked up in surprise, Sam added, "Blaine told me to make sure you got this."  
  
"So he wants me to audition?" Kurt asked, trying to ignore the happy little flutter he felt as he said it. The most popular kid in the most popular clique at school wanted  _him_? Wanted him to be part of the group, part of the in crowd?   
  
It had taken months and countless looks during glee club to even get Finn to acknowledge his existence, let alone talk to him - and he would  _never_  have suggested Kurt come sit with the football team at lunch even if 90% of them hadn't been trying to kill him at any point in time. Status there was everything, and you didn't get to just jump into the inner circle unless you were either a new star athlete or dating one of the star athletes. The latter almost never happened unless you were a Cheerio anyway, so there weren't many opportunities for people to improve their standing.  
  
Here he was, poised to join the resident rock-and-roll icons? And Blaine was personally recruiting him to do so?  
  
He couldn't stop grinning.  
  
Until he realized what this meant. He needed to prepare an audition song - and not just  _any_  audition song, the best possible song to showcase his voice, his range, his emotive depth, all in three minutes or less. This was the audition of his life...and none of his music was at school with him. It was all back in Ohio in his hope chest, beneath the blankets but to the right of the issues of Vogue and above the posters of movie stars he would have hung on his walls but he felt like it would clash with the decor.   
  
"What's wrong?" Sam asked.  
  
"What I'd need for the audition is all back home, but I can't go get it because there aren't any passes given the first month." His dad had volunteered to bring him whatever he needed, but absent his dad bringing the entire trunk he was unlikely to get what he needed. He would end up with four songbooks and six Vogues, plus a plate of cookies or something from Carole; not exactly what he was aiming for. Sweet, but not going to score him the place on the Warblers.   
  
"I'll take care of it," Sam replied.  
  
"How?"  
  
"Warblers can get passes. We do it all the time."  
  
Kurt looked at him skeptically. "Right."  
  
"Seriously. Warblers are like...like the mob or something. We can get anything somehow."  
  
He was joining the private school equivalent of the mob. Somehow that just made him feel  _better_  - though he knew that wasn't probably the right response to have to that image.   
  
But he would look fantastic in a fedora.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt couldn't help but grin as he climbed the familiar front steps onto the rickety porch, fingers tightening around the bag he carried. Mr. Jones had been swearing he was going to fix it from the time Kurt had been at most 11; it was still old and looked like it might cave in at any moment. He didn't have too much room to mock; there had been projects on the old house that his father had been swearing up and down he was just about to fix for the better part of a decade. The new house was  _new_  and hadn't accumulated that kind of repair yet, but he was sure that - when it did - at least a few of the projects would get put off awhile in favour of the urgent fixes.   
  
The lawn was more manicured now, a reflection of Mrs. Jones having more time around her own house and less time around the Hummels'. The garden had always looked presentable; now it looked lush, lovingly cared-for. He wondered if she was forcing Mercedes to help her with the roses and smiled to himself at the memory of how many summers he'd listened to her complain about how much she hated them and would rather be doing almost anything else.   
  
He rapped lightly on the wooden frame of the screen door, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. It felt like he'd been gone for a lifetime and yet like he'd never left; in reality, it had been exactly six days. He didn't want to think about what it would feel like when he'd been gone for the better part of a semester.  
  
Mrs. Jones appeared in the door and let out a kind of surprised, delighted caw as she pushed open the screen. "Boy, what are you doing home? Your dad said you wouldn't be back for at least a month!" He set down the bag he was carrying just in time. She drew him into a tight hug, though she hadn't quite adjusted to the fact that he was so much taller than she was now so she didn't lean up quite enough; he leaned down to meet her halfway.   
  
"I had to come get a few things for school, so I'm back until tomorrow afternoon."  
  
"They treating you okay up at that fancy school?" she asked, holding him at arm's length to take a good look at him.   
  
"The work is more challenging, but the people are kinder," he replied.  
  
She had a way of looking at him that still made him feel like a disobedient seven-year-old. He suspected that, no matter how old he got, her scrutinizing gaze would always make him seem smaller.  
  
After his mom had died a few months before his seventh birthday, his dad had put an ad in the paper seeking a housekeeper and nanny - a single man couldn't be expected to raise a kid by himself, certainly not one as 'fussy' (for that had been what adults called him at that point; it was a brief period between 'particular' and 'finicky' but long before 'special' and 'artistic') as Kurt. He had a business to look after, after all, and surely he couldn't cook well enough to keep the two of them alive and fed on his own. Mrs. Jones had been the third person his dad interviewed and liked her immediately; apparently, Kurt learned later, Mrs. Jones had been on at least five or six interviews before that one and everyone balked at her request to be allowed to bring Mercedes along. His dad's response had been simple, logical: Of course she could bring her kid. He couldn't very well ask her to come watch his son only to leave her daughter alone at home or staying with some other relative or friend. What sense did that make for anyone? Besides, the kids were the same age, Kurt didn't really have many playmates, why not at least see if they got along?  
  
Kurt didn't know until years later that such an arrangement was apparently unorthodox to a nearly eye-popping extent. He also didn't realize until he was probably 12 or 13 that his father's edict that he call Mrs. Jones, well, Mrs. Jones, and treat her with respect, wasn't typical, especially not from men of his father's general demographic in Lima.   
  
"Mercedes is upstairs, since I'm guessing that's who you're really here to see," she teased. "You staying for dinner?"  
  
He had learned a long time ago that his negative response would not be accepted; he would come downstairs to a heaping plate of food in his usual space regardless. "I wouldn't miss it," he replied with a smile as he picked up his bag and ascended the stairs. Unsurprisingly, he could hear her [singing](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrd14PxaUco) from halfway down the hall.  
  
_She give me money  
When I'm in need  
Yeah, she's a kind of  
Friend indeed_  
  
That was the sound of being home - Mercedes belting her lungs out to-...Ray Charles? Maybe. He was much more used to her singing to Dinah Washington, which was a little bit more natural fit for her voice. Ella Fitzgerald on occasion, Billie Holiday if she was in a lousy mood. But ever since John had gone off to Howard, he'd been sending her back more modern bluesy kind of artists to try to get her into it - something about how they rearranged it all in their own style and she should, too, since her voice was too big for those other girl singers. Kurt could agree with that part, though blues wasn't his thing. He liked precision - like the Warblers.  
  
_I got a woman  
Way over town-_  
  
She hit this amazing note on 'way' that made him grin as he paused outside the door, then pushed it open. She sat at her vanity, painting her nails in a shade that was far too bright of a pink to go without comment from her mother.  
  
_That's good to m-_  "Kurt!"  
  
"Mercedes."  
  
"Oh, get in here, you - you have to tell me everything!" she said excitedly. Kurt was just glad he didn't seem to be the only one who felt like it had been more than a week. After all, they'd gone a week without seeing each other before - when she went to see her cousins in Pittsburgh every year, when he and his dad and Carole and Finn had taken a big trip as a new, bonding family out to Chicago about two months after the wedding...but this felt so much longer, probably due to the permanence of it all. Before, they knew it would only be a week and the countdown seemed to bring a sort of relief; this time, they knew it would be at least a year with only intermittent visits and that made ever day seem  _longer_  somehow.   
  
He was under the impression, thanks to a conversation he'd had with Blaine about homesickness, that it was a kind of inverse parabola - he would get less homesick over time, then go on an upswing again as he realized just how long he had been gone. Apparently homesickness between Thanksgiving and Christmas was a foregone conclusion, but finals were distracting...and by the time January rolled around everyone was desperate to get back to school and away from their crazy families. Kurt found it reassuring to know someone he respected and got along with had been through the same thing and come through it okay.   
  
"There's so much to tell, I don't even know where to start," he stated as he entered, shutting the door behind them. For some reason, he had always been exempt from the 'boys and girls in separate rooms or with the door open' rules - probably because Mrs. Jones knew him better than she even knew Mercedes and trusted him. He half-flopped onto the bed, smoothing the quilt where it bunched under his hip.   
  
"How are you even here?" she asked. "When you called Tuesday, you said it would be a month!"  
  
"The Warblers - their glee club," he explained. "Apparently they can break any rule they want as long as police don't get called to campus. That's what Blaine said, at least." Well, sort of. What Blaine had actually said was that they could get away with most things as long as police didn't get called, but not to tell Wes or Thad anything that went on. David was apparently okay with occasional rule-breaking but was an easy nut for the other Council members to crack.   
  
But mostly he just remembered how Blaine looked as he came up to him with the pass, pictured him striding over confidently in the hallway near the Commons as he said, "We are like the mob - though with fewer guns and more singing and dancing. So really it's more like West Side Story." If he didn't already want to be Blaine's best friend, that reference cemented it.  
  
"Blaine?" Mercedes asked.  
  
"Their lead singer." He couldn't help the smile when he thought about Blaine. He was just so... _friendly_. So kind. And confident in a way Kurt was envious of.   
  
Kurt had never been half as confident in himself as everyone around him thought he was, but something about Blaine's easy charm seemed so much more natural. Even though he knew there was vulnerability lurking underneath, in spite of the halting way he had described what it felt like hearing taunts at his old school, Blaine's confidence seemed to radiate from within instead of feeling like his own carefully-constructed front had - a cold, flimsy facade. Which meant either Blaine was a much better actor than Kurt knew, or he was truly an enviable creature to have that kind of self-assured demeanor.  
  
He wondered if it might be a little contagious, the way Blaine's grin was. After all, he physically couldn't stop himself from grinning when he thought of Blaine doing the same, and he was decidedly not a happy person who smiled very often. Maybe if he spent more time with Blaine, some of the genuine confidence would rub off on him. His stomach fluttered excitedly at the idea - and the knowledge that, if he nailed this audition? He would be spending quite a bit of time around Blaine, watching him perform. Exactly what he needed to develop the kind of confidence he was seeking - and in an arena in which he already had some degree of confidence. If there was one thing he knew, it was his voice.  
  
"I'm auditioning on Monday after classes, and I need your input," he stated, hauling a stack of books and sheet music out of his bag. "They're incredible, Mercedes, everything they do is completely acappella and everyone in there is really talented. I need to blow them away. Now. I've narrowed it down to these choices-"  
  
"Which choices?" she asked suspiciously, eyeing the large stack that didn't seem to have any demarcation to indicate that some of the songbooks had already been stricken from the list.  
  
"These," Kurt stated, gesturing to the entire stack. "You know this isn't even a quarter of my collection."  
  
"Do you even sing half of these?" she asked, picking up the book on top and flipping through. "Okay, you have never in your life sung Ritchie Valens."  
  
"No, but I  _could_ ," he replied. "I've only heard them do one song, and it was Frankie Lymon. They might only do popular music, and I really want to get this right."  
  
"So you're going to blow them away by doing a song you barely know? Please." She gave him the look she'd been giving him since they were kids, the one that said 'don't even try to test me, because you know I know you better than that.' "Sing what you're good at. I know you know what that is."  
  
Kurt smiled faintly and nodded, closing his eyes for a moment. "I knew there was a reason I came to you."  
  
"You came because you love me and can't stay away," she teased as Kurt sifted through the music with a more critical eye. When he was done, he had a stack maybe a third the size of the original, made up primarily of showtunes and standards. "Now that's more like it."  
  
While whittling down the choices helped somewhat, it didn't end the agonizing decision-making process. For one thing, his Broadway sheet music collection was sizable. For another, the majority of the songs that would have ended up in the final cut even without Mercedes' guidance regarding genre would have been in the Broadway stack because that was where his voice shone brightest.   
  
"Show Boat?" he asked, holding up the tattered book. If the themes would resonate anywhere, it would be at Dalton - as opposed to in Lima, where a local production had been shut down once over the miscegenation scene.   
  
"No one knows Show Boat," she replied, flicking through the stack.  
  
"Sure they do. The movie isn't that old, it came out when we were...eight? I know your mom took us."  
  
"No one but you knows Show Boat, movie or no movie." She held up another book. "The Music Man."  
  
"Why is it so important that it be something popular? Shouldn't my voice speak for itself? Let me make it my own? Maybe it's better if they don't know it."  
  
"Only if they don't tune it out," she replied, and Kurt had to agree. "So Music Man? You sound really great on 'Goodnight my Someone'."  
  
"Used to sound really great," he corrected. "I slide on the F and haven't had the A5 in months." He also wasn't entirely sure how they would take him singing a girl song. At McKinley they were used to it, they all kind of joked about it, but figured that - with his falsetto - he would be a good substitute-girl if ever they needed one...even if what they needed were guys because even with Kurt they were outnumbered 4-3. But at an all-boys school, it could either be fantastic...or disaster. He wasn't sure which one, and he wasn't sure that now was the time to test it. "South Pacific?"  
  
"Not for you," she replied. "Too... _butch_."  
  
"What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded.  
  
She ignored the ridiculous question. "What about West Side Story? I bet if you transposed it up a little, you'd sound great on 'Something's Coming.'"  
  
"You think?" he asked, taking the book as she handed it over and flipping to the song.   
  
"Probably. I haven't heard you on it lately, but I know you know it - and you used to sound like you were struggling on the low notes, but you wouldn't anymore."  
  
"No, I'd have those. And it does have a pretty wide range, so I could show off a little," he nodded. "Probably up a third, maybe a fourth - I'd have to play with it," he mused. Something about it just didn't feel... _right_ , though. Kurt wasn't sure why; it was a great song, he could put the break wherever he wanted so he could flip into his upper register in exactly the right place, and it was a song traditionally sung by a man - and Blaine at least knew it, since he'd made the joke about the Warblers being singing, dancing mobsters. But one of the skills he prided himself on the most was his ability to connect intensely emotionally to a song, and 'Something's Coming' - while great and technically challenging - wasn't that kind of song. It was-...there was emotion in the original recording, but much more subtle and not the kind of thing where he would really  _shine_. Still, it wasn't an awful choice, and he was sure he could harness-  
  
"...no," Mercedes said slowly, pulling a torn songbook from the middle of the stack. "No, babe, it has to be this one."  
  
He took one look at the cover and shook his head. "No way."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
He had about fifteen different reasons why not that one, starting with it was a song sung by a girl - not even a woman, a  _girl_ , including a lot of the ones he'd been around the local community theater with. It didn't require nearly the kind of technical skill that another song might, and for a group like this he should be showing every trick he had. It wasn't quite in his perfect range anymore, and he knew he was going to have to watch for scooping. But the reason he said was, "It's even older than Show Boat."  
  
"First of all, it's not, and you should be proud I know that."  
  
Kurt's eyes narrowed and he sighed. "Okay, yes,  _technically_  Show Boat premiered in 1927 and this was later, but the movie is much older than the film Show Boat."  
  
"Second, everyone knows it anyway."  
  
"It's old-fashioned."  
  
"It's a classic," she corrected. "And you sing it better than anyone I've ever heard. You have to do this one."  
  
Kurt drew in a breath, all prepared to argue with her, but he had learned a long time ago - namely during the ill-fated audition when he had sung "The Sweethearts of the Team" from 'Too Many Girls' over Mercedes' express questions of his sanity - not to argue with her when she told him what song to do. "Really?" he asked, but she knew he had caved already.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He couldn't remember the last time he'd been this nervous over an audition.  
  
It made sense, he supposed, considering how much of his career at Dalton was riding on this. If he did well, he would be  _in_  - in the inner circle, the most powerful, popular clique in the school. It seemed like the right way to ensure that things would go better for him than they ever had at his old school. He wasn't sure if his association with Sam and the fact that Blaine seemed to like him at least a little would be strong enough to keep him in the group if he wasn't...in the group.   
  
On the other hand, being nervous was going to end up ruining his chances if he didn't get it under control.  
  
Drawing in a deep breath, he steeled himself, and moved his notebook and sheet music from their position clutched against his chest to a more natural one at his side. He could do this, he reminded himself on a slow exhale. He was fantastic. His voice was great. He would be fine. He would be-  
  
"Hey," Blaine smiled as he walked through the ornate hallway towards the door of the Commons. "All ready to go?"  
  
He forced a confident smile, hoping it would pass muster; it certainly appeared to. "Yep, just...waiting to be called, but all...ready to go," he said, mentally kicking himself for how awkward he sounded.  
  
"It shouldn't be too long - don't worry," Blaine assured him. "You'll be fantastic. Break a leg," he added as he disappeared into the Commons, and Kurt was left standing in the hallway. A few other Warblers whose names Kurt was still learning (he thought these were Trent, Clark, and Pete, but he could have been completely wrong on that) filed in, then Sam turned the corner.  
  
"You okay? You look kinda green - not like silvery alien green, just...sick."  
  
"Fine," Kurt replied with a deep inhale to try to calm his nerves again. He was fine for a few seconds at a time, at least - if only he could manage to breathe this deeply and evenly while singing. "Hey, how'd the physics quiz go?"  
  
"Don't ask," Sam mumbled. "Whatcha singing?" Kurt held up the sheet music, and Sam looked intrigued. "Cool. I don't think I've ever heard a guy sing that before, but I'm sure you'll be great. I gotta get in there." He, too, disappeared into the room.  
  
What was he  _doing_? Kurt wondered. He should've just gone with West Side Story, shouldn't have let Mercedes talk him out of-  
  
"Kurt?" Blaine's head poked out of the door. "We're ready for you now."  
  
Kurt nodded, drew in a slow, even breath, and forced his best performance smile. He could do this. His voice was extraordinary, and he knew it well. There was nothing to be worried about.  
  
If the Warblers were intimidating at the lunch table, they were nearly terrifying all perched on couches and chairs, staring at him expectantly. Even the friendly smiles and warm looks didn't reduce the pressure. Blaine smiled encouragingly at him, and he tried to relax a little. Blaine certainly seemed to think he could do this, maybe that was the kind of confidence he needed to have in himself.   
  
"Where's the-" he held up the sheet music and glanced around for the piano, only to find none.  
  
"We don't use accompaniment," Wes stated, his tone tight and irritated. "Not for performance, or rehearsal, or auditions."  
  
Right. Kurt felt like that should have been obvious, but he hadn't even thought about it. "Of course," he mumbled, tucking it into his notebook and setting both on the table. He stood front and center, facing the two dozen or so boys watching him from their seats, directly across from the three-member Council who were already scowling at him like he was an idiot. Awkwardly he wiped his palms on his pants, not sure when clamminess became a symptom of nervousness that he exhibited.  
  
"Whenever you're ready," David said, and the fact that he looked just a little less perturbed than Wes or Thad was a little bit of a good sign at least, right? Kurt hoped so. He knew his acceptance ultimately wasn't up to the Council alone, but to a full vote of membership - which was the only reason he hadn't hightailed it out of the room already. He could win them over if he nailed this. And with this song...  
  
He could do this. His pitch was perfect, his song choice was right, and his voice was impeccable. He just needed to focus.  
  
With one final deep breath, he began to [sing](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJ2Q0F8H80).  
  
_Somewhere over the rainbow  
Way up high  
There's a land that I heard of  
Once in a lullaby_  
  
One of the few things he could count on in life was that his voice didn't shake when he got nervous. He was thankful for it as he began the song, allowing the sound of his own voice to wash over him, relax him a little. He wanted to make eye contact with the audience, to not stare above their heads - that would telegraph his anxiety for everyone to see - so he picked the friendliest face he could find.  
  
Blaine had a mildly shocked look on his face, like he hadn't been expecting either the song choice or the voice - or both...but it melted slowly into a more neutral impressed look. Not a full-on grin, not even the sweet smile Kurt was getting surprisingly dependent on to get through the day at a school where he still knew fewer than a dozen people's names. More like the look he'd seen the first evening - his face a mask but with something undeniably smiling in his eyes. It was exactly what he needed to see.  
  
_Somewhere over the rainbow  
Skies are blue  
And the dreams that you dare to dream  
Really do come true_  
  
It was a bit of a cliche song, perhaps, and entirely overdone and definitely old-fashioned, but it  _fit_  this week. It seemed appropriate.   
  
For as long as he could remember, he had longed for something - for somewhere else. For somewhere he could be understood, and uninhibited, and something other than uptight and miserable. He had spent ten years of school in Lima trying to make himself as cold as possible, completely unfeeling so that when they made his life miserable he wouldn't care. So he wouldn't give a damn when they called him a sissy or a nigger-lover or a queer or any of the other hateful things he'd been hearing every single day since he was five.   
  
And here he was, after a week, unable to stop himself from smiling - like it was a reflex he'd been shoving down for so long that now that the cover was off, he couldn't quit.   
  
This was his over-the-rainbow.   
  
It sounded sappy enough that he would have rolled his eyes if he weren't mid-verse, but he felt like Dorothy - leaving his black-and-white world where he had never been appreciated or recognized, where he was just the source of trouble and his family had to constantly come to his defense...and emerging suddenly into a world full of colour and joy and music and  _possibility_. A place where he could be the hero - or, at least, not part of the problem.   
  
He had never imagined-...he knew it would happen someday, and he knew it would feel good, but he'd never imagined it could feel like  _this.  
  
Someday I'll wish upon a star  
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me  
Where troubles melt like lemon drops  
Away above the chimney tops  
That's where you'll find me_  
  
Blaine couldn't stop staring at Kurt.  
  
He wanted to. He desperately,  _desperately_  wanted to be able to tear his eyes away, to look anywhere else - at any _one_  else, but he couldn't. He couldn't even just close his eyes and listen to the song and pretend it was being sung by some amazingly talented girl.  
  
Kurt was standing there, with those pink lips and those bright blue-green eyes and looking so damned passionate and all Blaine could think about was-  
  
No, he told himself firmly. He wasn't doing this again. He'd felt it before, it always went away. This sick, twisted sensation down to his core - he felt it hard and fast and then it dissipated just as quickly. The same with the thoughts, the fantasies, the images that left him aching and longing for everything he knew he shouldn't want. That's what had happened with the boy who lived next door to his family from the time he was five until he was thirteen, and with the college guy who bagged groceries in town, and with the senior during his first semester at Dalton...that one had been the most intense, the one that sent him reeling the most, and he blamed that entirely on the music. The boy, Ken, had been one of the leads that year, with an incredible stage presence and an easy confidence that Blaine had tried to emulate-  
  
He wanted to be like Ken, to sing like him and seem as effortlessly perfect as he was. There was something more he wanted, too, but he kept it in check long enough for the feelings to go away and that was the end of that.  
  
He could feel it with girls now, too, if he tried hard enough. If the girl was right, if she wasn't one of those daffy blonde things Jeff and Nick kept bringing around. Thad's girlfriend, if she weren't dating Thad, maybe. She was a sweet brunette, but with a sharp enough wit to keep him interested, with an incredible laugh and really pretty green eyes.  
  
Even if Kurt's were better.  
  
It felt so much more intense, staring at Kurt.  
  
It was just the song, he told himself. Like with Ken. He was just being drawn in because he loved this song; Kurt had no way of knowing his soft spot for Judy Garland. It was because of his love of music that he couldn't tear his eyes away.  
  
There was something else, though. A feeling like maybe Kurt would be in a position to feel the same-  
  
_No_. Because even if he were, and Blaine would certainly never make that kind of accusation without at least some shred of proof first...if he were...  
  
...then that made this feeling all the more dangerous, didn't it?  
  
_Somewhere over the rainbow  
Bluebirds fly  
Birds fly over the rainbow  
Why, oh why, can't I?_  
  
He needed to stop putting himself in a position to make it worse, he concluded with a firm resolve. As much as he wanted to be friends with Kurt, as much as he had to kind of like anyone who got up and sang this song - let alone sang it well enough to make obvious just how often he'd listened to it - and as much as he enjoyed Kurt's company...the feeling he got when he was with Kurt had to be enough of a deterrent. The sick, perverse feeling like he was doing something even if he never said a word or did anything- He had to keep that in mind.   
  
If he kept his distance, it would all go away. It had worked before, it would work again. With time and space, he would be able to see Kurt and those sparkling eyes without thinking about this kind of thing. He would be able to see Kurt's lips without thinking-  
  
He just needed to stay away for a little while. Cool his head. This kind of infatuation never lasted long for him - in a couple weeks everything could go back to normal, and in the meantime Kurt would be getting to know all the rest of the Warblers anyway. Yes. That was the plan.  
  
He could absolutely do that.  
  
_If happy little bluebirds fly  
Beyond the rainbow  
Why, oh why, can't I?_  
  
The applause and cheers layering over his final note snapped Kurt from his musical trance and he glanced around, flushed and grinning. He'd been performing more than long enough to know when he'd nailed a performance, and from the reactions...he had done exactly what he set out to do. He had impressed them. Looking directly across the room, he met Wes's eye and saw no contempt - that was a victory in and of itself. David was smiling. Thad looked intrigued.   
  
"Kurt, please wait outside while the vote is conducted," Wes requested.  
  
Kurt nodded, and he tried to hide his confident smile, but it slipped through as he said simply, "Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate you considering me." It was a level of formality that seemed strange but like it was probably appropriate, and he had a hunch that he would be getting used to it pretty quickly. Sam gave him a discreet thumbs up as he left the room, letting out an almost gasping breath as he reached the hall. The adrenaline was pumping now, making his legs quiver a little, sending his mind reeling. That had gone better than any audition he'd ever  _had_. Mercedes was not going to let him hear the end of this one, not after she insisted he do the song and they liked it so much. He owed her a phone call and a thank you tonight - after he called his dad, of course, to let him know. And maybe to gloat a little to Finn about how much more amazing his singing group was than New Directions ever could be - even if the group hadn't been disbanded for the year.   
  
He felt almost dizzy as the door opened and Jeff told him he could come back in. Luckily he was nothing if not well-practiced in making his emotions unreadable, and when he stepped into the room he was the very picture of decorum. "Kurt Hummel," Wes began. "While the precise results of the voting must remain secret, I can say that it was not a close decision. Welcome to the Warblers." With a bang of the gavel, Kurt found himself practically bombarded by the rest of the group, cuffing his shoulder, congratulating him, offering welcoming comments and complimenting his voice. He felt himself almost glowing when one of the boys made a comment about this being why the Council shouldn't have been so quick to dismiss "girly songs" last year, and a few people mumbled something about reconsidering that now.  
  
He felt on top of the world.  
  
His eyes met Blaine's over Nick's shoulder, and Blaine froze. He wanted to say something to Kurt - anything really. Something congratulatory. A compliment on his vocal talents. A remark on his incredible control over his falsetto or a question on just how high he could go because it sounded like he probably had quite a bit of range even above what he'd demonstrated.   
  
Anything that would put him in close proximity to that ecstatic smile.  
  
Not in a million years, he chastised himself angrily. There was no way he was going to be that much of an idiot. He was going to go up, congratulate him, be polite and friendly but not  _too_  friendly, warm but not  _too_  warm, then back off until he had gotten it through his thick skull that he wasn't doing this anymore.  
  
Feeling this way at 14 had been one thing, had been maybe a little okay. At 14 he couldn't look at a tree without thinking about sex, so looking at boys and thinking about it wasn't so bad. But he was 17 now, almost 18, and it was time to start being a man. Time to start thinking about meeting a nice girl he could settle down with - about letting his parents select a nice girl for him, more like, since he didn't exactly have much opportunity to meet people outside of Dalton - and marry after he got his education. And as prettily as Kurt sang songs like a girl...he wasn't one. He was a boy - a  _man_  soon enough - and this wasn't something he was going to get involved in again.  
  
He had enough strength to do that, he was certain; it was just a matter of making sure that his will matched that power.  
  
He strode across the carpet to Kurt as the crowd started to dissipate. Four words, that was all he was going to say: Congratulations. You sounded great. That was all he needed to say - and was true, of course. Four words.  
  
"Hey," Kurt said, cheeks flushed pink with exhilaration and just a tinge of embarrassment and pride. "What did you think?"  
  
_You sounded great. Congratulations._  
  
"I have the Garland at the Grove album in my room if you ever want to come listen to it. I haven't met anyone else here who really likes her - or Wizard of Oz, either one."  
  
As he cursed his impulsiveness, Kurt's face broke into a full-on grin. "I would love to. I haven't heard that album - but I have A Star is Born and Summer Stock. We could swap if you want."  
  
_No, thank you. I should concentrate on my schoolwork._  "That'd be great."  
  
"Actually, since I don't have a record player here, maybe...more like we'd listen to them all together," Kurt suggested, and Blaine's heart leapt at the same time his stomach sank, leaving him feeling nauseous and too warm and like everyone was staring at him. They weren't; his confident mask never slipped. As the Council pulled Kurt aside to describe the attendance policies and start figuring out which line to put him on, Blaine allowed himself to slip back into the group.  
  
Damn it. He was in so much trouble.


	4. Chapter 4

Quinn Fabray wasn't the type of person who enjoyed having nothing to do.  
  
It was September and she had a Friday evening free. That hadn't happened since she was about 11. Before becoming head Cheerio as a junior, she had been their rising star the first two years of high school. And before that, she had been on the junior cheerleading squad that came out to essentially warm up the crowd to cheer for the Cheerios.  
  
She didn't miss school, but she missed that. The roar of the crowd as she stood at the top of the pyramid, the feeling of falling for a split second as she performed her perfect dismount, the adrenaline of it all. The feeling of being on top of the world - on top of the school, on top of the town. She missed the looks she got as she walked down the hall in her uniform, the red and white pleats swirling against her knees, red cheerleading sweater exactly one and a half sizes too small to emphasize exactly what the boys wanted but didn't get to touch. The seas  _parted_  for her when she walked through the hallways in her uniform, made her feel admired. Envied.  _Powerful_.  
  
She was craving that feeling already. What was the point of going through day-to-day life if no one even looked at you?   
  
Why did everyone have to go so crazy over this integration thing, anyway? she wondered. Sure, she didn't like the kids from that colored school, and she was certain that as soon as they reopened with all the schools combined there would be some rule that a certain number of cheerleaders from their squad had to be allowed onto the Cheerios even though there was no way they were technically on par. And she would be damned if any of those girls thought they were going to take her position as Captain - she had  _earned_  that. But it wasn't like McKinley was actually all that white and pure anyway - after all, if Sandy Lopez was allowed to be Vice Captain and felt like she had the right to keep snapping at Quinn's heels, trying to one-up her and steal her position, and she was ethnic, then what was the difference anyway?  
  
Sandy could change her name from Santana and try to look as pale as she wanted; she still wasn't really white.  
  
She needed to get back on top, to feel that rush of... _something_  again. To be powerful. To be attractive and  _popular_  again.  
  
Finn was a moron and all he could talk about whenever they were together was that stupid job working on cars - did he even know how to put together an engine? He could barely open his locker some days. When she was around him, all she felt was the urge to roll her eyes. Being together when they were the school's power couple made sense: after all, what better way to be elected Prom King and Queen than to be the quarterback and the head cheerleader? She had been dreaming of that moment, her coronation as official ruler of the school, for longer than she'd dreamt of anything except possibly her debutante ball. But now that all the parents in town had ruined that for her, it made her wonder...was Finn worth it? Sure, they'd been together for three years now, and his class ring rested on a chain around her neck next to the gold cross her daddy had given her for her First Communion, but he didn't make her feel  _special._  More like he was a boy and she was a girl and the rest was just kind of...there. He wanted to go further than kissing, but not because of her - he would want to go further than kissing with that Rachel Berry freak from glee club, clearly it wasn't about the girl being attractive.  
  
But there were guys who made her feel that way.  
  
Her pink sweater set was tight enough to show what she wanted but covered enough to appear demure, enough to get him leering but not enough to make her feel easy. Even if she desperately needed to feel like she was wanted, she didn't want to feel quite that cheap - he was still going to have to work for her. At least ply her with a few good lines. Reassure her that she was at least as pretty as Sandy, even though her boyfriend was an idiot.  
  
When the door opened and Puck's eyes drifted up and down her body, she felt a little frisson of excitement. It was the closest to alive she'd felt since last year's cheerleading season had ended.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Sam let out a deep sigh as he set down his bag and half-slammed his books onto the desk. Kurt glanced at the clock - 7:32; Sam was back more than a couple hours early tonight. "Something wrong?" he asked quietly.  
  
"What's the point of practically killing myself studying every night when it doesn't actually help?" Sam flung a folder down on the surface with a satisfying 'smack.' "Sorry, Kurt, I just-" He sighed again and shook his head.   
  
"Got back a test?" Kurt swiveled in his desk chair to face him, closing his book in a fluid motion to hint that he wasn't too busy to listen if Sam needed it.  
  
Sam shook his head. "Essay. But same result. It's always the same result." He sank into his chair. "I just don't understand it, y'know? I study, I stay up reading until my head hurts and I'm practically cross-eyed, and I feel like I understand it when I'm in class, but it's like everything I turn in just gets ripped apart. I mean, I know my spelling's not great - it's never been good - so I'm used to getting a bunch of points taken off, but this teacher even uses one of those rubrics where they can only take off a certain number of points for that and I still fail?" Kurt nodded sympathetically, not sure what to say; he knew Sam worked hard. It was impossible to see him and not know how hard he was trying, but it wasn't something Kurt could really fathom. Schoolwork had always come easily for him, and even now at Dalton with their rigorous standards and heavy course load, he still managed to finish his work with plenty of time and energy to spare. The only subject he had trouble with was the same one he'd always hated - anything in the sciences - and Sam outpaced him by far in that arena...and yet. "My parents are going to come down on me again," he mumbled. " What do they want from me? I- I don't go out, I can't remember the last time I even  _saw_  a girl, I quit football because the practices ran too long, but my father keeps saying if I just tried harder- that they  _know_  I'm not stupid so it must be that I'm not applying myself-"  
  
"You are," Kurt assured him gently. "Everyone here knows that. We all see it."  
  
"Yeah, but they don't." He shook his head again. "You know they were planning on pulling me out here and sending me back home this year? We would've still gone to the same school," he added with a lopsided, sad smile. "Figured since I'm not actually benefiting from any of the academics here, may as well send me to an easier school and not waste their money, but you can't transfer to a school that's not open."  
  
"What's even the problem?" Kurt asked. "Is it that you don't understand the question, or-"  
  
"I wish I knew. I get everything right when the guys'll quiz me, y'know? Eric and I can sit there for hours and he'll ask me history questions and I'll get every single one, then I go to write this essay and I think it's good, but..."  
  
"Maybe you're just not good at essays," Kurt suggested. "Some people aren't, some people are really good at memorizing facts and dates. I'm the opposite."  
  
Sam ran a hand back through his hair. "I'd think that, but even in physics I can't manage a decent grade. And you  _know_  I know that."  
  
"You're the only reason I'm passing that class," Kurt replied. It wasn't quite true - he would probably be able to pull off at least a C if he forced himself hard enough, but thanks to Sam he had a solid A- average. Not bad for his worst subject.  
  
"Wanna take my tests for me then?" Sam joked. "I'll help you study beforehand, give you all the answers, you'll go in and take the test for both of us, we both win."  
  
"If only." Kurt thought for a moment, then said, "Do you have your quiz handy?"  
  
Sam handed over the folder he had slammed onto the desk with a wry "Here - have them all," then hesitated and added in a quieter voice, "Don't laugh at me, okay?"  
  
He looked so nervous as Kurt took the folder that it made him ache a little. "I wouldn't," Kurt assured him quietly, meeting his eyes for a moment. He'd been laughed at more than enough times in his life-...Maybe that was why Sam was one of the nicest people to him here. Not that anyone was mean or hostile, not like he was used to, but there was something kind of purposefully accepting about Sam that Kurt couldn't explain. It was beyond just not mocking his skincare routine or looking at him like he was a freak for racing to the local store to buy the new Vogue, like even if they had not a single thing in common (because Kurt was sorry, but he didn't care about space invaders from planet doom or whatever thing Sam had been talking about a couple nights ago, and he knew Sam felt the same way about the evolution of the New Look), they were still part of the same club. Metaphorical club, not just the Warblers. He wondered what Sam's pre-Dalton school had been like, if they were cruel there instead of rallying around him like the Warblers seemed to.   
  
And he wanted to help, even if he had no idea how.  
  
Opening the folder, Kurt saw a stack of returned assignments, all practically bleeding red ink, several with "See me!" comments at the top. Every subject, every kind of assignment and exam. No wonder Sam looked so concerned about mockery and seemed so defeated about it all. After flicking through a few other pages, he retrieved the physics quiz and reached over to find his own. He had gotten a 93 - a welcome surprise; Sam's didn't have a number on the top, but the red slash through almost every answer made clear what the final letter grade would have been.   
  
What wasn't clear was where Sam had gone wrong. They were questions that Kurt knew Sam had basically given him the answer to the day before the test - had explained what concepts were at play, what forces to consider, all Kurt had to do was fill in the equation, do the math, and he got it right. But looking at them...Sam's answers weren't even  _close_. The diagrams were right, but everything after that... "How are you at math?" he asked as he studied the first question on each paper, attempting to follow Sam's scrawling handwriting to figure out where in the equation he had gone so far off-track.  
  
Sam shrugged. "Same as the others, I guess. Which is weird because when I was a kid, I could always do stuff really fast in my head. And if we're out and need to figure out the tip and stuff, I can calculate that before the guys write it down, but that's not like, Calculus or anything."  
  
That made even less sense, then. Because Sam would dutifully write down the equation with variables, he put the numbers in the right place, but the answers to the simple multiplication and division problems weren't even close. Dividing 43 meters, the distance an object had fallen, by 9.8 m/s 2, he got 5 instead of 4.388 (Kurt's answer, and the correct one). "Did you think we were supposed to round to the nearest whole number?" he asked, though even that would have been wrong.  
  
"What?" Sam moved his chair to look over Kurt's shoulder at the papers side-by-side on the desk. Kurt pointed to the equation on each page, and Sam just kind of kept peering at them, trying to figure out where he had gone wrong.  
  
Could he not see it? Kurt wondered. Was it a vision thing? No, obviously Sam could see - he didn't have any problem identifying people as they walked past, and while his writing was messy and a little all over the place, it was certainly not indicative that Sam's vision was a problem. "You divided 43 by gravity and got 5 instead of-"  
  
Sam shook his head. "49."  
  
"What?"  
  
"It'd be 5 if the object was at 49 meters, not 43."  
  
Kurt checked quickly, and Sam was right, but that only confused him more. "But the question said 43, and that's what you wrote down."  
  
"Really?" Sam shifted, trying to get a better look, so Kurt moved the papers closer. He squinted, ran his fingers under the equation, then nodded. "Yeah...yeah, it says 43. Guess you're right."  
  
Kurt studied the next question. "And over here you copied the whole thing down wrong."  
  
"I did?"  
  
"Yeah - see?" Kurt pointed. "It should be the square-root of 2d over g, you put dg over 2."  
  
"Sorry." Sam sounded more frustrated by the second, like a sullen kid being chastised by his parents - which he had been, Kurt reminded himself. Quite a bit, from the sound of it.  
  
"No, don't apologize," Kurt told him gently. "I wasn't trying to- I'm just trying to figure out why you did that when I know you know the concept. You were explaining to me the day before why you divide by the gravitational constant, why it's the square root-"  
  
"Because in the original equation, time is squared, so to find for t you've gotta take the root," Sam confirmed.  
  
"Exactly. You know the equations, you know why they are what they are, but when you go to copy them, something happens."  
  
"The lines blur together sometimes," Sam tried to explain. "Not like, y'know, blurry, not like getting a new glasses prescription, but it's hard to stay on one. That's what Rick kept saying, anyway, during Lord of the Rings."  
  
"What about it?" Kurt asked.  
  
"Well, see- Okay, last year I was failing English because my essays kept sucking, and the Council convinced my teacher that if I could read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and give a presentation on it by the end of the year, she'd raise it to a B. Rick and Jeff and a couple of the guys who graduated last year, they would talk about it at rehearsal and it sounded awesome - y'know, with all the creatures and the mythology and the quest? I mean, I'm more into science fiction but it still sounded pretty cool. They figured I'd be into reading it, and I tried - I really did, but do you know how long those things are? Probably not to you, but it was so..." Sam sighed and shook his head. "Every night for at least an hour, on top of the rest of my homework. I felt like an idiot - I  _feel_  like an idiot. And it's awful because I know if it were a movie, I would love it. The stories sound so great, and the characters are neat...Or if it were a comic book? So great." He sighed again and mumbled, "An hour every night and all I managed to get from it was learning to speak Elvish.  _That_  I can do. Too bad my essays are in English."  
  
Kurt started to reach out to touch Sam's shoulder, in absence of being able to say anything reassuring, but he stopped with his fingers a few inches from the curve of Sam's bicep. If this were Mercedes, he would hug her, but boys were so often weary of him touching them. He would have chalked it up to the fact that boys were less tactile than the girls he knew, but they seemed to be fine touching each other - Finn and Puckerman clapped each other's shoulders or patted each other's backs after a great play in whatever sport, all the guys did. When he had touched Finn's shoulder exactly once before they were brothers - in a similar situation, kind of, with Finn confiding in him that he thought Quinn was going to break up with him - the response had been stiff and awkward. No one ever  _said_  Kurt couldn't touch them, but their body language made their aversion clear.   
  
Except Blaine, obviously. And Sam seemed to be more like Blaine than like Finn, and the boys at Dalton seemed a lot less nervous around him, didn't appear to have the instinctive bristle whenever he came around. With a light touch, he rested his hand on the curve of Sam's shoulder and got a faint, sad smile. "If it's getting frustrating, we can stop," he offered. "I know having someone rip apart something I was working on would feel horrible."  
  
"You're not the one ripping it apart - you're at least trying to help," Sam replied with a shrug, and Kurt took that as his sign to pull his hand away. "Kinda like detective story or something. The Case of the Missed Questions." His smile, like his joke, was forced - but Kurt could appreciate the effort as well as the reflex. He forced a little reassuring smile of his own and moved on to the next question. This time Sam had inverted two numbers. Further down the page, he had multiplied by 45 instead of 54, obviously yielding the wrong answer. By the time they reached the end of the first page, they'd been through eight questions and there was exactly on thing Kurt was sure of:  
  
Sam couldn't help any of it.  
  
He saw how frustrated and defeated his roommate was, how much he wanted to be doing better; this wasn't carelessness. He saw how much his roommate  _knew_ ; this wasn't stupidity. It wasn't an issue of Sam not reading the questions carefully enough - Kurt had watched him do his homework. He read questions two, three, four times...and still missed parts of it. There was nothing Sam was failing to do here that he could or should be doing to improve his score. Especially not because every time Kurt asked him a question, Sam got it right - just like he said he did when Eric was tutoring him in history.   
  
Something else was going on.  
  
"You should take the night off," Kurt stated, standing. He stretched carefully, then toed on his shoes.  
  
"Where are you going?" Sam asked.  
  
"The library," Kurt replied, pulling on his jacket and straightening his tie.  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because I'm going to figure this out," he stated. "You're not stupid, Sam. I think there's something wrong with the way you see things."  
  
"Like I need new glasses?" He sounded confused, and Kurt honestly wasn't sure whether it was over what might be wrong with him that he hadn't yet been able to identify, or over the statement that he wasn't stupid.  
  
Kurt shook his head. "You can see the numbers, you just mix them up or put them in the wrong lines. You can see the blackboard or the textbook in front of you, but you don't understand what it's asking. You can answer every question a person reads you but you get it wrong on the written exams. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to find it." He slipped on his loafers, grabbed a notebook, and hurried out of the room, down the stairs, and out into the cool evening air. The library was open until 11 on Fridays, that meant he had almost 3 hours to get started.  
  
He needed to figure out where to begin looking. If his suspicions were correct, then he was probably going to need to start with...hm. Eyes? Brain? Mental condition? He had no idea - science wasn't something he'd ever particularly been intrigued by, and he had a sinking feeling that Sam would actually have to be the one to unlock the mystery of whatever it was because Sam was the only guy he knew here who was really into science.  
  
Or possibly just into physics, he wasn't actually sure. Something about velocity of rocketships seemed to be the impetus for most of Sam's interest, so there was a decent chance that Sam wasn't actually all that versed in biology anyway. Not that that was the point.  
  
His shoulder bumped hard into someone else and he glanced up to offer a quick apology to find himself face-to-face with- "Blaine. Hello. I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention-"  
  
Blaine cursed his luck. He had managed to avoid Kurt, except for Warblers practice, ever since his realization Monday. For four days, he had been forcing himself to stay away, to not worry about whether Kurt was settling in, to not take Kurt aside and gently explain to him the differences in the way the Warblers operated to help him settle in...and it had seemed do-able, like he could handle not seeing Kurt all the time, could force himself not to think about all of the things he didn't want to think about.  
  
Except whenever he saw Kurt. If Kurt was in the room, it was like he sucked all the oxygen out and left Blaine panting in twisting in its wake. Whenever Kurt was there, whenever he saw the nervous twitch of his thin lips or heard his voice or saw the elegant flick of his perfect hair, it took increasingly more energy to keep himself seated, upright, stiff - to not rush over and grab him and whisk him away to somewhere private.  
  
Blaine knew what he was. That didn't mean he had to enjoy it or do anything to perpetuate it.  
  
"It's okay," Blaine managed, his throat suddenly dry. "Where are you off to so fast on a Friday?"  
  
"The library," Kurt replied. "I need to do medical research."  
  
"Is everything okay? That sounds serious." He kicked himself for caring so much, for not just continuing across campus to the student parking lot to meet up with Thad and a few other guys to go pick up their dates.   
  
Kurt nodded. "Everything's fine. You don't happen to be a secret biology whiz, do you?"  
  
Blaine laughed nervously. "Uh, no. Can't say that I am."  
  
"Oh." Kurt sighed, then looked Blaine up and down; he wasn't wearing his uniform. It was the first time he'd seen the guy in something other than their mandated clothing. He wanted to comment on the fact that that jacket did  _not_  suit Blaine's complexion and the shirt and tie barely went together in an aesthetically-pleasing way, but all he managed instead was, "Where are you off to?"  
  
"A bunch of the guys are going in to town. I should go, actually, the girls are probably waiting for us."  
  
_Girls_. Kurt wasn't sure why that sounded so strange to him. Of course Blaine would be going out with girls when he got the chance - all the boys did, except for him and Sam. Just because Sam worked so hard he couldn't justify taking the night off for a date, and just because he hadn't met any girls he particularly wanted to 'go with', didn't mean that everyone was as antisocial as the two of them. But something about the idea of these girls watching Blaine be charming all evening made him uncomfortable.  
  
He just missed him, was all, he realized suddenly with a kind of longing feeling. Blaine had been busy all week, couldn't really stop and talk, and he understood that - he did. Blaine was a senior, they didn't really know each other, they weren't particularly friends, and Kurt didn't have the right to cling to him just because he had shown a tiny bit of kindness in his first few days at the school. He had a tendency to do that, he knew - seize on any boy who was nice to him and want to dominate all his time. It was a mistake he'd made countless times with Finn, he knew that.   
  
"Right," Kurt replied slowly. "I'll let you go then. Enjoy your night."  
  
Blaine closed his eyes as Kurt turned away. He had to almost physically fight the urge to tell Kurt that he'd stay - he imagined the two of them in the back corner of the library, huddled over a spread of dusty books, as they contemplated whatever biological question Kurt was researching. Just sitting across the table from one another, catching an occasional glimpse of those eyes-  
  
No, he told himself. Thad said his girlfriend picked this date of his, and she seemed to have decent taste - and decent friends. He would spend an evening with a cute, charming, funny young woman and enjoy himself a lot more than he possibly could sitting in a library with some  _boy_.  
  
If only Kurt could just be 'some boy.' But that was the larger war, wasn't it?  
  
"You, too," he called, half-joking, as Kurt continued across the yard to the library.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The reference section was the most frequently-used area of the library, but on a Friday night at an hour before closing time, Kurt was the only one there. A stack of medical textbooks garnered from local universities sat on either side of him - a small stack to his right, that which he had completed reading and come up empty, and a much larger stack to his left that contained the rest of the books he needed to check.  
  
He was fairly certain, after skimming the opthomology book, that there wasn't actually anything wrong with Sam's eyes themselves - well, aside from needing glasses, but that was hardly an unusual condition or the cause of Sam's problems...and, he suspected, probably because Sam spent so much of his time hunched over books trying to get grades that would please his parents. The problem had to be something bigger than that, something wrong with the way Sam's brain unscrambled (or scrambled, in this case) whatever he saw. He wasn't sure if that fit into neurology or psychology, so he had both types of books open, flipping back and forth every few chapters in the hopes that would help him find an answer sooner.  
  
So far it wasn't working, and he suspected his system wasn't nearly scientific enough to yield him the kind of result he wanted, but it was the best he could come up with for 10:00 on a Friday with no real basis in medicine beyond his incredibly basic Biology course freshman year.  
  
The psychology textbook was several years old and starting to come apart at the binding, as though too many Dalton students had previously tried to look up everything that was wrong with them. Kurt supposed he could see why - the subject matter was beginning to be a little  _en vogue_ , the type of thing that all individuals were meant to know at least a little about even if they didn't believe a word of it, and it was terrifyingly easy to find previously-undiagnosed disorders that you had been walking around with this entire time. For example, in the first twenty minutes reading this text, Kurt had discovered that it was entirely possible that he had a psychophysiologic skin reaction, a psychoneurotic depressive reaction, and a Chronic Brain Syndrome associated with metabolism, growth, or nutrition. He still had no idea what Sam had.  
  
This was getting him nowhere. It was easier to understand than the neurology text, which was written so densely that he couldn't begin to decipher it, even with the medical dictionary at his side. At least the psychiatric conditions book was written at a lower collegiate level, probably pilfered from someone's freshman or sophomore course at Ohio State, whereas the neurology book seemed to be aimed at medical school students.  
  
The next chapter was entitled Sociopathic Personality Disturbances - probably not Sam's problem. It sounded like something involving one of those gorey murder movies Finn liked to drag him to, where the main character was a sociopath: someone who lacked any moral responsibility or social conscience, according to the dictionary (he'd looked it up once while trying to prove a point; unsurprisingly, he had been correct and Finn had been... _Finn_ ). He flicked through the pages quickly until his fingers stuck on one. He wiped them on his trousers, firmly opposed to the idea of licking them to get a better grip, but his eyes caught on a word:  
  
"queer."  
  
It was a word he had heard before, more times than he wanted to think about, and he knew what it  _meant_  (which was: run and don't let the guy calling you that catch you), but it was strange to see it in a book like this. Glancing up to the top of the paragraph for context for why the insult was there, he saw the heading  **Homosexuals**  and began to read. He couldn't explain the nervous flutter in his chest - what was one more syndrome to read about at this point, right?   


 

> **Homosexuals**  - From the Greek "homo" and Latin "sex"; previously diagnosed as psychopathic personality with pathlogic sexuality, or antipathic sexual instinct. Often colloquially known as bent or queer, with other regional terms gaining in popularity, homosexuality refers to the unnatural demand for an intimate sexual relationship with members of a person's same sex. This demand can appear latent in some but most often manifests in aggressive, predatory behavior towards males and often towards young boys. These compulsions for same-sex sexual contact are pervasive and occur over a period of years.
> 
> The related condition  **Sexual Inversion** , first identified by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1897, refers to physical, social, and emotional traits relating to the inverse of one's natural sex: that is, female traits for male inverts and male traits for female inverts. While it is unknown whether one condition causes the other, they are frequently comorbid, with one hallmark of sexual inversion presenting as erotic homosexual attraction. Other common afflictions in male inverts may include a more docile temperament, interest in feminine activities and careers, and in extreme cases even a feminine shape such as rounded hips.

  
  
Kurt slammed the book closed with trembling hands, toppling his chair over as he tried to scramble backwards, as though putting physical distance between himself and the tome would make it go away. One fist closed over his mouth as the other wrapped as tightly around his torso as he could make it, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to will himself to disappear.  
  
He tried to think about anything else - anything other than what he'd just read, anything benign and pointless and mildly pleasant. A perfectly normal Friday night dinner with his dad and Carole and Finn. Listening to music with Mercedes.  
  
The feeling of Blaine's breath on his neck and the reaction it had garnered.  
  
He let out a strangled whimper, shaking his head fiercely as he pressed himself back against the wall, half-crumbling as his knees threatened to give out on him. No. No, he couldn't- He couldn't have that, could he? He couldn't be that kind of-  
  
...but everything about it made  _sense_.  
  
He tried to remind himself about every other syndrome he'd thought he'd had over the course of the two hours researching. For awhile he'd even almost convinced himself he had a few of the conditions listened in the chapter about mental deficiencies before reminding himself that he probably wouldn't be getting such high marks on all his exams if that were the case. It was just something he was making up. Surely. It was just something that he had gotten into his head and was reading too much into - he had been doing it with conditions all night.  
  
But everything it said seemed too  _right_. It was nothing he had put words to before, but it was-...it was true, all of it was true. Right on down to the size and shape of his hips and the fact that he...well, he acted like a girl. There was a reason people had been saying that since he was practically in first grade. There was a reason his best friend wasn't a boy.  
  
There was a reason that the way Blaine even  _looked_  at him made him blush. There was a reason that the only two people who had ever caused the warm, shivery below-the-belt feeling were boys. Blaine and Finn - was that what this would be called? Erotic homosexual attraction? Was that what it meant when he felt that jolt of energy coursing through his body whenever Blaine smiled at him?   
  
Oh god. Oh no - what was he going to  _do_?  
  
He wanted to go back to the table, to flip the book back open and start looking for the cure, the treatment, what scientists were doing that would make him better. Diseases either had cures or they killed you - like cancer had killed his mother. Diseases either were treated or you withered away and died. He wasn't sure which one he preferred at the moment, but either way - he needed to know. He needed to know if this was something he could fix and  _how_.  
  
But he couldn't bring himself to look. He couldn't force himself to tiptoe back over there and see that- that  _word_  again.   
  
He couldn't look, because what happened if it said there was no cure? If there  _was_  no getting better?  
  
He ran past the table just close enough to snatch up his notebook, then raced out of the silent library as quickly as his legs could carry him. The weight crushing his chest felt like it could kill him if he didn't stop; he wondered if that was better or worse than the alternative.


	5. Chapter 5

He couldn't sleep.  
  
The evening out with the guys had been perfectly fine. Any time Nick and Jeff got into jukebox wars made for a fun night, especially once David and Thad got into picking sides and trying to sway Wes into doing one song or another as a group. None of them were much good at talking to girls, but what else was new?   
  
What else could even be expected? They went to a boys' school, most of them had never attended a co-ed institution of any kind, and they were used to generally just spending all their time around, well,  _guys_. Girls were kind of a a foreign, unknown entity to all of them, so strange in their desires and conversations and the fact that they all went to the bathroom in a group as if makeup could only be reapplied in the presence of others.   
  
Luckily for them, the girls who were around often - Wes's girlfriend, and David's, and Thad's - all kind of had gotten used to it. They knew to expect that the boys would spend most of their time waiting for dinner talking about the Warblers, most of the time after dinner popping nickel after nickel in the jukebox, and generally not pay nearly enough attention to their fine young ladies. They had learned to joke about it instead of finding them annoying as countless other girls had done - as Jeff and Nick's dates no doubt would. Blaine doubted either of those girls would be interested in seeing the pair again.  
  
And his date had been lovely. Her name was Laura; Thad's girlfriend Betty knew her from the cheerleading squad. She was interested in music and theater, she was smart and sweet, and she had a great laugh. She reminded him a little of Patti Andrews, whom he considered to be kind of the ideal woman, and she blushed when he reached up to brush a stray blonde lock out of her face, looking up at him through her eyelashes coquettishly in the way the ingenue always did in movies right before Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart or whoever leaned in to kiss her.   
  
He had pulled his hand back awkwardly instead and apologized for being too forward.   
  
He liked that she was shorter than he was, but he found himself wondering if the ingenue look would have the same effect if the person making it were taller - say about two, three inches taller than he was - and if it would look sweeter and more innocent if the eyes in question were an intriguing mix of blue, green, and grey instead of Laura's deep brown.  
  
By the time he returned to his dorm at the end of the night, settling into the tiny but private room afforded to seniors as a reward for putting up with three years of horrible roommates, Blaine felt nauseous and doubted it was from the slice of pie he probably shouldn't have eaten. He tugged his tie loose and carefully hung his jacket on the side of his closet devoted to clothes that needed to be sent to the cleaners, then sank onto his bed with a defeated sigh.   
  
What was wrong with him? Why was he doing this to himself? What part of "avoid him and he'll get out of your system" hadn't been a clear enough plan?  
  
And why was he seriously lying in bed at nearly one in the morning, contemplating slipping out of his dorm room to creep into Everett House to go check on Kurt and see if he had found the answers he was looking for in the library earlier in the evening? It was like he was trying to make up any excuse to defy his perfectly simple, entirely reasonable plan.  
  
He had more self control than this.   
  
* * * * *  
  
He couldn't sleep. Who could, after finding out something like  _that_?  
  
Kurt sat in the center of his bed, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them tightly as if he could somehow pull himself inward more and more until he just vanished. Somehow in the stillness of the room, it seemed like a distinct possibility. Like he could just keep moving further and further into his own body until limbs met, inverted, and he would pop out into some parallel universe where none of this existed.  
  
Maybe he'd been listening to Sam talk about science fiction too much, he thought with a wry smile. The very movement of his lips trying to twist upwards made his heart ache and his eyes sting, as though the act of displaying any sign of relative happiness just made how he really felt seem that much more agonizing.  
  
He was sick. And not just a little sick, either - crazy. Completely and totally-...it was under a heading that included the word _sociopath_. His mind swirled with images of people, characters in movies - serial killers, people who lured pretty young women to their homes and then strangled them-  
  
Only in his case it wouldn't be young  _women_ , would it? That was kind of the point.  
  
His stomach clenched, and he wasn't sure whether he was going to be sick or not. In the end, he just pulled his knees closer still and buried his face against them, trying desperately to draw in a deep breath as he pictured newsfilm footage on the insane: moaning, shuffling, wild-eyed shells of people screaming nonsense out at the world from behind doors with bars instead of windows. A terrified whimper escaped, and he jerked his head sideways to make sure Sam hadn't heard him. The boy kept sleeping, undisturbed by both the noise and the deep crisis going on just a few feet away.  
  
He didn't understand it. How could a person be that sick and not know it? How could he have been walking around with not one, but  _two_  sociopathic sexual conditions his entire life-  
  
Had it been his entire life? He wasn't even sure. Was this the kind of thing a person developed? If so, when? Had there been a time before, a time he was normal, a time he was like everyone else, and then suddenly he just...got sick? Was an illness like this more like cancer or like...he didn't even know, mongoloidism or something? The fact that he couldn't really come up with any illnesses that a person was born with other than that made him think that most diseases weren't from birth; you got sick later.  
  
Which meant there had been a time...sometime, somewhere...a time he had been normal. Why couldn't he remember it? Why couldn't he remember a single time he felt right?  
  
From the time he started being around other children he hadn't been like them, he knew that much. He'd been different, especially from the other boys. None of them listened to musicals or liked to cook with their mothers, none of them cared if their shoes matched their belts and they didn't mind getting dirty. From the time he was five, when he started school, he had been more like the little girls than the boys, and those differences only got more pronounced as he got older.  
  
Had he been normal before he was five? Could he even remember? Was there even anything to compare it to? Because sure, he had enjoyed the games his mother played with him, and he loved that she let him help around the house, and he  _loved_  helping her pick out her clothes and accessories in the morning (his favourite game)...but did other little boys do that, too? Or was it, as he suspected, something that only girls did?  
  
Had his hips been this size forever? Or at least this proportion?  
  
Had he always been this...what had the book said? "Docile?" He had never enjoyed the rough-and-tumble games the other boys played, he knew that, but there were other boys who didn't like them either. He suspected Sam probably hadn't been that type of kid, either. So did that mean that all boys who preferred to read or draw or just play on the swings like civilized humans instead of wrestling like monkeys (as his mother would have said) were sick like he was?  
  
And, if they weren't, what was the difference? Was it about the erotic sexual attraction part? Was that what made a boy sick instead of just "sensitive?"   
  
He still didn't know what to make of that idea in particular. He wasn't particularly... _sexual_  in the first place. He knew boys who made jokes about it, he knew Finn wanted to have sex but Quinn wouldn't let him - and the fact that he knew that at all had been a giant sign of brotherly bonding and trust because no one was meant to know any of that. Thanks to health class, he knew that sexual desires were normal for guys to have, but he had never really contemplated it. Was it just because he wanted something other than girls? And what would that even  _mean_? He couldn't fathom what two men would do - not that he could contemplate what a man and a woman would do much more easily, the films in class had been deliberately vague and used strange metaphors about flowers to go with the upbeat music and peppy voiceover. He knew girls liked boys with good hygiene, whatever  _that_  meant  
  
He didn't know what to make of the entire concept, really. It was too foreign to contemplate.  
  
Did that mean he was less sick than people who were aggressive in their attraction? What did that even mean?   
  
At the very least, he concluded slowly, he had always had that sexual inversion thing. At least from the earliest time he could remember, which involved being three years old and wanting to play in his mother's heels. If the disease meant a man who preferred feminine things, and Kurt could think of few items more feminine than his mother's clothes and accessories, then he definitely had had  _that_  forever.  
  
And if sexual inversion was always connected with homosexuality, then that meant he'd always been that, too...didn't it? Or at least, that he was guaranteed to develop it. Or something like that, he thought.   
  
That conclusion did nothing to comfort him.  
  
He almost wished he could be like those women he'd known growing up; friends of his mother but far more traditional, they went to church at least once a day and spent most of their free time praying. When his mother had gotten sick, they had started going to church twice a day instead so they could add extra prayers for her to be healed.  
  
She wasn't.  
  
He had never believed strongly in anything - at least, nothing in that sense; he did believe strongly that Grace Kelly was the single luckiest person alive, and that Auntie Mame should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and that the new Chevy model was infinitely better than the Thunderbird even if all Finn's friends seemed to want the latter. But he was suddenly struck by the fervent, desperate desire to be as naive as his mother's friends had been, to be innocent enough to believe that prayer would take away this illness.  
  
But prayers couldn't cure a person. Not even someone who really deserved it, and he wasn't sure whether he did.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Donna."  
  
The suggestion was met with a mumbling of assent and exactly one clear "No" so loud that it stood out even against the nearly 20 other voices it opposed. Bobby stood and shook his head. "Not 'Donna.'"  
  
Kurt was still getting used to the way the Warblers operated. His old glee club had been kind of a study in disorder, a type of chaos that somehow always resolved itself with approximately ten minutes to spare. Here, there was much more order, a lot more structure, and yet no adults officially in charge. And sometimes it was okay to comment or speak up, but other times - like when he had suggested an arrangement of "Fallin'" that he would be happy to spearhead - it was considered poor form and/or a violation of Council procedure. Sometimes it was perfectly fine to suggest songs, but at other times it was almost a threat to the Council's power and authority. So far Kurt hadn't been able to pin any of that on a personal distinction - that was to say, he didn't think it was a matter of Nick or Blaine being able to suggest songs while he was not because he was new. However, until he figured any of it out, he was trying to learn to sit back a little, to not jump in with his ideas, at least not until he had a better read on the best way to do it.  
  
Nonetheless, the Saturday afternoon Warbler meetings were proving to be entertaining, if only because it was Kurt's lone opportunity to see them "casual." Unfortunately, as it was an official function as part of a school organization, uniforms were still required...but they seemed to take an odd interpretation of what precisely that meant. Ties were optional, and there were several boys wearing the red sweater vest, while others were in the full blazer. A few were wearing non-uniform black shoes.   
  
At least trying to figure out what the rules were was keeping his mind off everything else for the first time in eighteen hours. For the most part, anyway. Every once in awhile he would catch himself thinking about it, remembering, and the sick feeling in his stomach would creep back up on him.  
  
"Why not?" David asked.  
  
Bobby shook his head. "She's my girlfriend."  
  
"So? Isn't that a good thing?" Kevin asked.  
  
"She's already said she's coming to the competition. If I sing 'Donna', she's going to think I'm singing it  _to_  her, and then she's going to start asking why I haven't given her my pin yet. We've only been going together a couple months, but she's already obsessing. Every time I see her, it's about how this friend got a boy's ring or this girl got pinned after two dates - it's too much pressure!"  
  
"Okay, fine," Thad allowed. "But I think David was right about Ritchie Valens. He's really popular right now, and the past few years the schools that have done popular songs at Sectionals have done incredibly well."  
  
"Anyone know La Bamba?" someone - one of the basses whose names Kurt thought was either Ed or Fred - called, earning chuckles from some and confused looks from the others.  
  
"On guitar," Sam offered with a lopsided grin.  
  
"We can't sing it unless anyone knows what it means," Wes stated. "Not after the incident in 1947 in which the Warblers attempted to sing an impromptu song by Edith Piaf during a convention at which a French delegation was present. Rather than singing the iconic title line, they sang 'J'ai envie alose.'"  
  
Kurt laughed at the idea of twenty boys in uniforms singing in all sincerity "I have in mind to herring!"; he was the only one laughing, though he did catch Blaine smirking and trying not to chuckle.  
  
Wes was not so amused. "That was nothing compared to the unintentional vulgarity they sang later rather than the lyric 'Dont je connais le cause.' It nearly caused an international incident."  
  
"What about 'Cherie'?" asked Bill, the only boy in the Warblers with a voice higher than Kurt's.  
  
"You just want the solo," Blaine joked, but in a way that made it pretty obvious he wouldn't try to fight the boy for it even if he could make an otherwise good case for just changing the key.  
  
"No," Bobby groaned. "No. You can't do that."  
  
"What now?" Thad asked at the same time David joked, "You have a second girl named Cherie?"  
  
"No - c'mon, you guys. If I get up there in front of Donna and sing a song with  _another_  girl's name in it?"  
  
"This is why we shouldn't sing songs with girls' names at all," Wes stated firmly.   
  
"But that cuts out so many good ones," Blaine protested. "Come on. I'm sure we can trust girls not to read too much into it. Guys may write songs about girls to get a date, but when it's something on the radio I think it's clear what our intentions are."  
  
"You just want to sing 'Tell Laura I Love Her,'" Nick smirked.  
  
Blaine's discomfort at the overt reference to his date from the previous night was carefully concealed beneath a confident, mysterious grin, as if there might have been more to the night than everyone else had seen; there wasn't - a chaste kiss on the cheek as he walked her from the car at the end of the night, but that had been gentlemanly rather than anything illicit or blush-worthy. Though she wouldn't have been a poor choice of girlfriend, once he had to get one. He was starting to hit that point, he knew, but he kept putting it off. He wasn't one of the boys that was whispered about -  _yet_. For now, a date every now and again with a different girl and a vague brush-off was more than sufficient. And once Kurt was sufficiently out of his head, he might call Laura again to go out; she was one of the few who interested him even a little.  
  
His expression accomplished exactly what he intended for it to: a round of laughter and quasi-lecherous encouragement from the boys, and no one suspected a thing.   
  
Kurt tried to ignore the knowing grin Blaine wore, the reaction it garnered- he assumed it had to do with the night out with girls that he had mentioned before Kurt went to the library. But the mere thought of the library had him feeling queasy again, out of sorts. He steeled himself, trying to project his most calm, even demeanor, but his fingers tightened just a little too much around his notebook and his jaw clenched just a bit too hard as the boys started a rousing discussion on the merits of "Peggy Sue" versus "Wake up Little Susie" because no fewer than four guys had gone with girls whose name was a derivation of Susan.  
  
It all seemed so normal. So casual. Was this what boys talked about when they went off to guffaw amongst themselves and left Kurt either alone or with the girls and a snide comment about his voice? Was this what Puck and Finn and the gorillas on the football team talked about when they were alone? Was it only new to him because he'd never been included in this kind of fraternal setting before?  
  
Was that why he felt lonelier than he ever had in his life, including the first six months after his mother died when he said maybe ten words in total? Was that why it felt like his seat had suddenly been pushed back a hundred yards and he was part of the conversation from that insurmountable distance?  
  
He knew logically that this was not the first time he had been part of this conversation; he had overheard boys talking about girls before, he was sure of it, and the conversations during lunch the previous two weeks had certainly included mentions of Wes's girlfriend, at the very least, who was applying to colleges in California over Wes's strenuous objections as he would be at...one of the Ivy League schools, Kurt couldn't recall which one. Suddenly it just felt so much more pointed, as if every comment about girls was being directed  _at him_. As if everyone was staring and laughing and reminding him how horribly, disgustingly abnormal he was and would always be.  
  
Could sick people ever feel normal? Even just for a minute? Because he had been trying all day, and the clammy, nervous feeling kept coming back every time he caught himself thinking about it. It didn't seem to be going away, and he had a sinking suspicion that it never would. Every time he was in a conversation with boys, a conversation where girls were mentioned, it was going to feel like this. He was going to feel like-...like an aberration. Like some pitiable, ill creature. Like the people in that residential facility where New Directions had performed once, where half of them were barely able to keep themselves seated upright without assistance and drugged out of their minds to keep them from acting on their inappropriate urges-  
  
...Was that the treatment for this? Was that what they did to people like him?  
  
It was what they did to schizophrenics, wasn't it? People who heard voices telling them to do horrible, illegal, dangerous things- If he heard voices telling him to...to want Blaine, did that...  
  
...did that count? Was he sicker than he thought?  
  
He didn't even notice the meeting wrapping up, but heard the sharp bang of Wes's gavel. His head snapped up and he saw Warblers leaving in groups of threes and fours. He began to gather his things and a thigh came into his line of vision. He glanced up slowly and found Blaine standing above him, looking concerned. "Are you okay, Kurt?"  
  
"Of course," he replied as smoothly as he could, which wasn't very.  
  
Blaine kicked himself for coming over to ask in the first place. He was supposed to be avoiding Kurt, to not spend all his time fixating...staring...it was just that the boy looked so achingly, breathtakingly  _sad_ , that was all. He was just trying to comfort his friend. To make sure nothing was wrong. That he was settling in okay at this new school that was kind of a strange world in and of itself. After all, Kurt was new to the Warblers, and he got the feeling that the guy was having a hard time adjusting to the energy of the room and the way they operated - his first day had gone pretty disastrously, after all, with the awkward attempts at humour and the inappropriate song suggestions. Maybe he was just feeling out of place and could use a friendly shoulder to lean on - someone who had been the new boy once and made it through with flying colours once he learned to blend in a little better.  
  
When he put it like that, he could almost believe it.  
  
"I know we take a little getting used to," he offered. "But don't worry - you'll fit right in. I promise."  
  
The kind sympathy in Blaine's eyes was almost too much for Kurt to take on its own; then he added the line that really twisted the knife. "You just need to keep blending in, like you've been doing."  
  
Translation: As soon as we know you're crazy, you're gone. No one will speak to you.  
  
That had to be what he meant. After all, if they all looked at him like he was nuts just for suggesting they sing a song by a girl, he could only imagine how they would look at him when they actually knew he was nuts.  
  
But then...wanting to sing a song by a girl was kind of the problem, wasn't it? The inverse what what a male should want. Maybe they all knew his secret already. Maybe everyone had known he was crazy for years - the boys at McKinley certainly seemed to know he was more like a girl than like a boy, and had since he had met any of them. Maybe everyone here knew, it too. Maybe he was the last to know.  
  
He was afraid to ask.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Sam? Can I ask you a question?" He cursed his voice for quivering, but the look on Sam's face seemed to indicate he hadn't noticed.  
  
"Sure." Sam looked up from his comic book - a Saturday evening treat after a long week of working nonstop, Kurt surmised. He was sprawled on his bed and seemed relaxed...downright comfortable. Certainly more than Kurt had seen in the time he'd known the non-blond. Maybe that was what happened when Sam wasn't stressing over school for a couple hours.  
  
The thought, combined with the enviable level of contentment his roommate appeared to be experiencing, renewed his commitment to find out what was wrong...once he could think of the word "library" without flinching.  
  
"Have you ever had a girlfriend?" The question tumbled out awkwardly from Kurt's tongue as he shifted stiffly, perched on the side of his bed. He wasn't sure why he felt better in positions that seemed to just elevate his level of stiffness and tension, but he always had; when something was wrong, when he was uncomfortable, it was like if he channeled all of that into his posture somehow it helped the rest of him relax. He was trying his level best now, but so far to no avail.  
  
Sam blinked, glanced down, then gave a kind of weak, crooked smile. "Not really." His voice rumbled low in his chest when he spoke, and it always surprised Kurt a little because he knew Sam only sang one line below him. He wasn't sure why Sam's speaking voice could be so low when his singing voice was so high - for Kurt it seemed to be a package deal, a fact he'd been lamenting since he was 13 and everyone else's speaking voices dropped.   
  
Was it because Sam wasn't sick and he was? Was the sexual inversion thing what kept his voice from sounding like everyone else's? It seemed strange that a mental illness would cause that kind of physical response, but considering it somehow related to his hips being the shape that they were, maybe it was related.  
  
He didn't know. He knew he could theoretically find out, but he wasn't sure he wanted to go down that road yet. He didn't know that he could go back to the library and flip through that horrible book and read what else there was to say about how crazy he was.  
  
"It's 'cause I spend so much time studying, y'know? And I don't really get girls, I mean - they're pretty, and I like them and all, but whenever I try to talk to one like, at mixers and stuff, they think I'm kind of a freak of nature or something. Girls don't really read comics or watch sci fi."  
  
Kurt supposed he could see the girls' points inasmuch as Sam was a bit of an acquired taste - a genuinely nice guy, but a little strange and with an even bigger tendency towards awkward humour than Kurt had, which was saying quite a bit.   
  
"I want to, though. Hey, maybe if we figure out what's wrong with me, we can take a Friday night off, find some girls, and go on a double date," Sam offered with a grin; Kurt got the feeling Sam didn't actually believe the day would come but desperately wanted to. Kurt desperately wanted to avoid it, even if he hoped to make the first part come true.  
  
Why was he so adverse to it? he wondered. He was practically a girl, he had always been best friends with girls, they always enjoyed each others' company, why not embrace the idea of going out with them? He already missed hanging out with Mercedes and girls from his own school, talking about the movies and music they had in common. Wouldn't a date be nice for that?  
  
...Until they realized Sam was the only real man at the table, he reminded himself. He was something in between, and that would only be more obvious when the four of them sat down together.  
  
"What about you?" Sam asked.  
  
Kurt thought about lying - about saying that he and Mercedes were an item. After all, he did talk about her all the time, more often than most of the boys talked about girls they were dating. He genuinely liked her and could maybe love her that way if he tried hard enough. They had plenty in common and had been best friends practically forever...and no one at Dalton would judge him for it, not the way they would back home. No one at Dalton looked at him strangely when they saw the picture of his best friend and her family on the night stand. No one would even think it was strange that their families had been close since he was a child, as long as he left out the part where technically her mother worked for his father - several of the guys were dating or had dated in the past girls that they had known for most of their lives thanks to their parents being in the same circles. He could just lie and tell Sam that he and his girlfriend Mercedes had been an item for some time now but prejudices back home kept them from going out much. Maybe in time he could even make that be the truth.  
  
He told a bigger lie instead.  
  
"No," he said, pasting on a fake smile. "Just haven't met the right girl yet, I guess."


	6. Chapter 6

Kurt paced nervously in the hallway. That the area near the phone was uncrowded was novel and expected all at the same time; he was used to seeing the wall beside the phone lined with boys waiting anxiously to call their girlfriends, their older brothers at college, their mothers who would send cookies...but at barely 5:30 in the morning on a Sunday, no one was even contemplating being awake yet. Even the Dalton students who elected to attend church in town - probably about half the population - didn't get up until closer to 8 as the early service was aimed at little old ladies and the 10:00 was the one that catered more to local students.  
  
He hadn't been able to sleep. Every time he tried, he pictured himself doing horrible things - violent, angry,  _hateful_  things. Grabbing young boys and dragging them to his bedroom. Pinning classmates against the wall to perform unspeakable acts that he literally couldn't imagine but knew had to exist in a theoretical, erotic context; things a sick person like him might do. Cornering Finn and rubbing up against him, the hardness in his pants obvious and nearly comically large, had seemed like the lowest of the low, the most disgusting thing he could think of, until he woke up and realized that the unnatural-yet-ubiquitous biologic response had taken over during his brief, fitful slumber and he almost burst into sobs.  
  
Picturing vague sexual acts with his stepbrother had been nothing compared to the horror of the next dream, though.  
  
Infecting Blaine with his sickness. Hanging around with him too much, making him listen to feminine songs and enticing him to join feminine careers and the next thing he knew-  
  
He wasn't sure if homosexuality was the kind of thing that spread through the blood or if he'd just seen Dracula too many times when he was stuck accompanying Finn and Quinn to the lousy old drive-in theater to act as a chaperon while the two of them made out in the backseat, but he leaned in to breathe on Blaine's neck, low and warm, like Blaine had done to him that day at lunch inadvertently, then practically attacked his neck with bites and sucking...and the next thing he knew, he could see Blaine's hips rounding and beginning to swish from side to side as he walked prancingly across the room, a deranged and sick look in his eyes.  
  
Kurt shook his head to try to metaphorically shake the dreams away as he paced again in front of the phone. A mostly-full roll of dimes bounced heavily in his robe pocket, and the quiet slap of his slippers on the floor seemed to echo all around him. What was he even doing? He couldn't say the things he was dying to say, the words that felt like they were crushing him slowly into a million tiny pieces; why even bother calling?  
  
Because if he didn't talk to someone familiar, he was going to lose his mind, he concluded. He was already partway there; he didn't need to make it worse.  
  
Drawing in a deep breath, he stepped up to the phone and lifted the receiver, slipping in a couple dimes clumsily to cover the long-distance call for at least a little while. He would have to stay relatively quiet, not disturb anyone in the rooms closest to the phone, but he could probably talk uninterrupted for longer than he would otherwise get - and he could definitely do so with decidedly more privacy.  
  
His father was a creature of perpetual habit, and Kurt knew that, while a call this early risked waking Carole, it wouldn't wake his dad. Sunday mornings he got up early for an extra long cup of coffee and to read the Sunday paper before heading in to the shop to catch up on whatever backlog collected over the weekend so people could pick up their cars as they got out of church and still make it across town in time for the big brunch buffet at O'Donahugh's. With quivering fingers, he placed his finger at the rotary and dialed with long, deliberate swipes.  
  
Surely enough, the voice on the phone was alert, if a bit concerned. That made sense, Kurt supposed, most calls at 5:30 in the morning weren't good news. "Hello?"  
  
"Hi, Dad," he whispered, sinking back against the wall. He wasn't sure what it was about his dad's voice that could reduce him to someone who sounded so much younger than he was. Maybe it was because he'd never been so good at keeping up all the walls around him. Maybe it was because as soon as his dad was involved he  _felt_  about ten years old, even though he was bigger than that. He was grown now, he was nearly a man; he shouldn't feel so much like a little boy.   
  
Mrs. Jones had the same effect but to a lesser degree. As much as his dad liked to credit Mrs. Jones with raising him, she went home at dinner time and had weekends off; the rest of the time, it had just been the two of them, two quiet guys trying to somehow ever interact with each other without so much as a single genuine interest in common.  
  
"Kurt? Everything okay? You're up pretty early."  
  
"Yeah," Kurt said quietly, trying to sound as okay as possible, to keep his voice as steady as he could. "Just couldn't sleep. I...fell asleep early last night, you know."  
  
Small lies to protect his dad. He couldn't begin to consider how many he'd told.  
  
"They're not working you too hard at that fancy school, are they?"  
  
"Nothing like that," Kurt assured him. "Nothing I can't handle. I'm doing okay, actually. It seemed like a lot at first, but I'm starting to feel like I'm hitting my stride."  
  
"Good." Burt's tone was reassuring, but at the same time confident and knowing. "I knew you'd be fine."  
  
Fine. Nothing felt fine. Nothing  _was_  fine. He was sick with something only criminals and psychopaths got and too afraid to go look at the book again to figure out how to be cured.   
  
He wanted to say something. To start bawling and beg his father to come get him and take him back home where at least he was a sissy but he wasn't a sociopath, to his nice, safe bedroom where he and Mercedes could listen to albums and slack off all year and he could ignore everything that the "normal boys" did, the way he had for his entire life. To ask his father to come get him and take him immediately to a doctor so he could get rid of this- this  _thing_.  
  
Instead he asked a quiet, painful question with careful, halting words. "Can I ask you something?"  
  
"Yeah, I guess so."  
  
"Do you ever think about...about me, being older? You know, a grown up - an adult. About me getting older and having a family of my own?"  
  
He couldn't picture it. He'd never really thought about it before, but he couldn't imagine himself with a wife and children and a house. He could picture himself at 19 living in a beautiful apartment in New York he had cut from a magazine when he was 10. He could imagine himself working at one of the fashion houses or being an editor at Vogue. But everything else, everything that seemed like the most natural thing in the world to the people he'd grown up with...it was one big blank, vague blur in his mental image.   
  
Did other boys his age picture it? It might be the kind of thing people only started thinking of once they were older. Did Finn picture getting married to Quinn and having babies with her? Was it something he was supposed to be doing this whole time that he was being robbed of without even knowing it?  
  
There was a long pause, and Kurt tried to picture his father's expression. Was he angry? Smiling fondly, the way he did when Kurt's baby pictures came out? Sad because Kurt's mother wouldn't be around to be a grandmother? Confused by the question? "Yeah," he said slowly. "I guess. I mean I don't really picture it, but I know you're gonna. Right now it's hard 'cause I still think of you as a kid, y'know? I know, I know - you're not a kid, but to me you'll always be about six years old, buddy."  
  
Kurt smiled very faintly. It was kind of nice knowing the feeling was mutual. "I understand."  
  
"But I figure one day you'll meet someone nice, settle down, have a family. I know better than to think it's gonna be around here. You've been telling me you were leaving since before your mom died, I know it's gonna be in New York or California or somewhere and I'm gonna have to drive a week just to see my grandkids," he added with a fond laugh that turned Kurt's stomach. "But yeah, someday."  
  
He wanted to be able to envision it, to tell himself that the lie he'd told earlier just might be true. It was entirely possible he just hadn't met the right girl yet. He certainly liked girls, he enjoyed spending time with them. He might even love one of them and not know it. How was he supposed to know what "that feeling" was, anyway? People tossed that word around and said crazy things like "When you feel it, you'll know." That wasn't of any use to him - how was he supposed to know what 'it' felt like if he hadn't experienced it? Maybe if he paid really close attention he could surmise what that feeling might be based on the way Finn looked at Quinn and the way some of the guys looked at their girlfriends. He didn't know what any of that  _felt_  like, though. It was just some kind of amorphous category of emotions.  
  
That was now likely off-limits to him. After all, love was about much more than erotic attraction, or so he'd been led to believe - mostly when the girls were pining over boys that they would never in a million years imagine going all the way with (or even part of the way with), and he wasn't ever going to have that, was he? There was a reason that the marriage license when his dad and Carole had gotten married had asked if either of them was an imbecile, an idiot, or incompetent: crazy people couldn't form that kind of bond.   
  
Certainly not perverts who had dreams about sociopathic sex with members of their own family.  
  
"What if I never find anyone I like who would be...appropriate?" he asked nervously, and he heard a deep sigh on the other end - a sound of complete and utter defeat from his father. His strong, proud, silent-type father sounded defeated.  
  
Oh god. He  _knew_.  
  
He knew what was wrong with Kurt, he had suspected it for a long time but never said anything, he knew Kurt was sick but hadn't had the heart to say- Like when they all tried to hide each other from the fact that his mother was dying. His mother knew, he knew, his father knew, but no one would say it because saying it made all of them hurt so much more. His dad knew he was mentally ill and couldn't say anything because it would make everything  _real_ , the same way Kurt couldn't bring himself to say the word even to himself in the safe silence of his empty bedroom.  
  
"I wish you could, kid," his dad said finally with a mournful note to his tone. "You have no idea how much I wish that. I want you to get all the things you want - and you know I like Mercedes, think she's a good girl with a good head on her shoulders. But the world's not there yet, buddy."  
  
Kurt blinked, confused. "What do you mean?"  
  
"You just gotta be patient, Kurt. Maybe when you move to the big city, if she goes with you...I know it's different out there, I know they allow stuff that folks around here won't. I know gettin' married's legal here, not like some of those states down south, but until the  _people_  change, get to where you are, are as accepting and big-hearted as you are...It's not safe. I'm sorry." Kurt was still trying to wrap his head around it when he heard another deep sigh and a "Just gotta get used to being on your own 'til then. Y'know, 'til you find somewhere where it's okay to love the person you love."  
  
He angrily fisted at his eyes, tears welling up, and it took all his concentration to keep his breathing even. It felt like sobs were gathering in his chest and just  _waiting_  for him to open his mouth so they could escape, and the mounting pressure was almost too much to bear. His dad thought he was talking about Mercedes. About interracial dating which, while hardly accepted, wasn't nearly as big as his actual problem.  
  
A week ago it would have seemed like his biggest problem when it came to finding someone to date. Before he came to Dalton, it would have seemed insurmountable - unfathomable that he could find a place where no one would bat an eye to see he and Mercedes kiss; now it was a cold comfort.  
  
He could date Mercedes here. He could date her in New York in a couple years and walk down the street holding her hand proudly. There would never be a time or place where he could walk down the street with a boy holding his hand.  
  
"You okay?"  
  
He realized he hadn't said anything yet, but the fear of breaking down into a heap of cries and gasps while telling his father everything that the call was really about. "Mmhmm," he managed, his voice high and tight to keep it from quivering.  
  
His father worried about him so much.  
  
From the time he could remember, even before his mom had died, his dad had been worried about him. He was a small kid for his age, fragile, and all the others were so...they were cruel. They had always been cruel for reasons he was only starting to really understand; he wondered if any of the people who had taunted him had really known what he was or just knew he was different. He wondered if that even mattered and why he cared so much even if he really was the last person to know. In the beginning, he would come home crying from school or limp home with bruises all over him after going to the local playground - and not bruises from jumping off swings or trying to walk on the teeter-totter, either, but from other boys shoving or kicking him, wrestling him even when he cried out for them to stop - and his dad would ask what had happened...and when Kurt told him- He was so hurt by it all. So angry that people would hurt  _his son_  like that.   
  
It wasn't until Kurt was a little older that he recognized the other emotion tangled up in all of it:  _fear_. His father - his big, strong, burly father who lifted tires all day without any problem or sign of exhaustion, was afraid of what a few unruly kids might do if he wasn't there to break it up.  
  
And that was when Kurt stopped telling him what was wrong.  
  
There was nothing that could be done about it anyway, and seeing his dad scared was terrifying. Downright painful - heartwrenchingly painful as he watched his dad look him up and down, seeing the scrapes and bruises and bloodshot eyes from crying all the way home. His dad didn't cry, but the way he tightened his jaw, sniffed once, and sent him inside to have Mrs. Jones clean him up...he may as well have. He felt so bad putting his father through any of that - after all, it wasn't his fault his son couldn't hold his own in a fight. And he had so many other things in life to be scared or sad about...the least Kurt could do was not add to it.   
  
He was about to add to it tenfold, Kurt thought with a ragged sniffle, tears burning his eyes as he wrapped his free arm around his torso. What could be scarier for a parent than knowing his son was sick? Let alone knowing his son was crazy and that it wasn't entirely the other kids' fault for hurting him over the years...  
  
He couldn't put that look back in his dad's eyes. Not now, not when they had finally gotten okay. Not when his dad had started smiling again, now that he had Carole - and Finn, the perfect, healthy son he had always wanted. The kind of son who didn't need protected and hadn't gotten beaten up on playgrounds his entire life. The kind of son who could play sports because he wasn't so sickly and small as a child and then too uncoordinated as a teenager to do much more than drop the ball when it was lobbed easily in his direction. The kind of son-  
  
The kind of son Kurt could only ever pretend to be.  
  
"I should go, there's someone else who needs to use the phone, but I'll call you this week sometime, okay?"  
  
"Sure, sounds good. You sure you're okay?"   
  
Kurt winced, angry at his voice for giving him away like that, and replied in his most practiced 'Nothing at all wrong here, I promise' voice, "Of course. I'll be home in a couple weeks for fall break, you can see for yourself."  
  
"Looking forward to it already. I miss you, buddy."  
  
His heart ached and he wanted to fling himself into his father's arms in a way that was wholly inappropriate but had never been trained out of him the way it had been for some boys; he wondered if it was because his father had always known he was sick and you didn't deny crazy people the tiny pleasures that made them feel minorly sane. "Miss you too, Dad," he whispered as he placed the receiver back in the cradle and tried to stand up straighter.  
  
He had to go back to the library, he concluded, glancing up and down the hallway to make sure no one saw him half-crumbling and in tears. He needed to go back to that library and figure out what precisely he could do to stop being sick. After all, most diseases weren't cancer or TB - most didn't kill you. Most had a cure or, at the very least, they had treatment of some kind. He could go find treatment and be-  
  
...be normal. Be better for everyone.  
  
His dad had looked out for him his entire life. He had tried so hard to make sure that Kurt could be healthy and safe and provided-for. He had sat through countless movies that he had no interest in because Kurt wanted to see them and he wanted to spend time together. He had never tried to tell Kurt to be rougher, to not cry, to stop liking certain things...he had tried so hard, and Kurt...  
  
Kurt owed his father this. After everything his dad had done for him, Kurt owed him to at least  _try_  to get better. To at least attempt to get help and not be mentally ill anymore. The quality his dad had always said he admired most in him was his strength - said it reminded him of Kurt's mother. She had fought as hard as she could to stay alive for as long as she could, taking every one of the pitifully few options the doctors gave her as potential treatments. She had tried her best...and Kurt had to do the same. He just had to. If there was even a chance that he could fix this...  
  
Everyone would be so much happier. Himself included.  
  
Drawing in a deep breath, he walked quickly and with purpose to his room, pulled on the first ensemble he could piece together, and headed for the library.   
  
The silence of the building was unnerving; the only other occupant was the ancient librarian who had been at the school, Kurt swore, since John Dalton himself was traipsing around campus, and it felt as if every footstep he made echoed through the stacks. He racked his brain trying to remember which book it had been in, which of the giant stack of potential references for Sam he'd moved on to by that point in the evening. He spied the frayed binding on a low shelf and stooped to collect it, then carried it to the table and began to flick through the pages with nervous, clumsy fingers.   
  
For a brief moment, he thought maybe he would discover that he had misread the original entry. Maybe he had been so shocked by the word that he'd made up some of what he thought he saw. After all, his reading comprehension was hardly at its best at nearly 11 p.m., perhaps he had fabricated entire portions of the entry. His heart sank as he found the page and began to read, finding the words exactly the same as they had been 36 hours earlier.  
  
Had it really only been 36 hours? It felt like a lifetime.  
  
He searched for the treatment portion - he had seen one with every other disorder - and found only two sentences.  
  


> Current treatment protocols range from electrical impulse aversion therapy, to electroconvulsive therapy, to prefrontal lobotomy or leucotomy, to castration, though the latter is falling out of favor amongst most experts. There are no reliable statistics for the relative success rate of any method of treatment.

  
  
Kurt swallowed hard, suddenly feeling far too warm despite the cool morning stillness around him. Lobotomy - so he really was crazy. That was what they gave schizophrenics to try to make them stop babbling. Or to stop other people from being credible...It was in the movie- damn it, the movie from the Tennessee Williams play, he'd seen it not six months ago with Mercedes, it had Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. Why couldn't he remember it?  
  
He really was losing his mind, he thought with a bitter, choked-off laugh. It echoed around him and made him feel like he was drowning somehow.  
  
And electroconvulsive therapy- He felt dizzy and wondered if he would have time to slam the book shut before he threw up so that when the librarian inevitably came to see what had happened and why he had made such a mess, she wouldn't see what he had been looking at. But the contents of his stomach stayed where they were, even as his tears blurred the words on the page together.  
  
Castration was-...maybe that was the one for him, he thought, trying to look on the less-devastating side, if there was such a thing. At least that one came with a career path, right? It was something done to only the most talented and honourable for centuries, something for people who occupied a position of trust, of power, of  _talent_. That certainly beat the other options, which were given only to people who were truly too far gone to ever be productive members of any society. Castrati were renowned the world over, and he had always taken pride in his singing range.  
  
Besides, it would be one way of getting rid of those disgusting, aggressive, overtly-sexual dreams. He couldn't attack people for the purpose of unwanted erotic gratification that way, right? Maybe-...maybe it wouldn't be so bad. He could be famous and talented and...abnormal for good instead of for ill.  
  
He wondered why it had fallen out of favor - was there some kind of other side effect? Or did most boys just not want to become Orlando di Lasso? And he wondered about that first option, what precisely "electrical impulse aversion therapy" was. The book yielded no answers, just moved on to sadism and other sexual sociopathic conditions that turned his stomach.  
  
Meaning he needed to find other sources of information.  
  
His legs quivered as he walked unevenly to the large card catlog in the center of the room. Slowly, he pulled the drawer labeled "hm-hu" towards him, the heavy wooden box making a conspicuous scraping noise as it slid. He cringed at how loud it was, as though everyone in a five-mile radius could hear and would somehow know what he was doing. When no one appeared to stare over his shoulder, he flipped carefully through the cards, taking large chunks at a time until he arrived at "hol-" and slowed down, moving fewer cards at a time until he arrived at his destination.  
  
 _homosexuality_  
  
The word still made him feel like an elephant had settled on his chest, but there it was. There were a few entries, but he knew that - if he couldn't remember the movie he was trying to think of - there was no way he would remember any of the information long enough to go find the book. He carefully plucked the relevant entries from the two rods holding it mostly in place, then slid the drawer closed and vowed to return the cards when he had finished.   
  
He was probably the only one looking, anyway. No one else around here had this problem. To be entirely honest, he was almost surprised there were entries at all.  
  
The first card sounded illicit, like something a school shouldn't be permitted to have on its premises, but there it was: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey. He slipped it off the shelf, then grabbed a larger book from a few sections over to conceal what he was reading, should anyone happen by. Not much chance of that, considering how early it was, but in case.  
  
It seemed exceedingly unhelpful. Not only did it not discuss treatment whatsoever, but as he skimmed the pages quickly to find anything that might relate to him, he was struck by the sheer oddness of what was apparently normal. He didn't want to think about anything in there. He didn't want to think about how many men had sex outside of their marriages - even if his father had been unmarried for nearly a decade, he didn't want to imagine what that meant, either. He didn't want to think about how 40% of males under 20 apparently had solicited prostitutes (and dear god, he hoped Finn wasn't among them!). He didn't want to read in such intimate detail about people's  _masturbation habits_  for crying out loud, and was he the only one who wasn't doing that?   
  
If he had felt abnormal and separate while watching the Warblers talk about their girlfriends and female conquests, he felt downright freakish reading this. Isolated beyond adequate explanation. Apparently he was the only teenage boy in the world who didn't fantasize about having sex with practically every pretty girl walking down the street - and acting on it with all manner of girl, or with themselves, either way. Evidently he wasn't just sick, he was  _bizarre_.  
  
Then he got to the section he was really looking for: Homosexual Outlet  
  


> A considerable portion of the population, perhaps the major portion of the male population, has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age.

  
  
Kurt stared at the sentence. That couldn't possibly be right. If homosexuality was a mental illness, was a sign of derangement on par with - or at least  _treated_  on par with - schizophrenia, then it could not by definition be an affliction impacting the majority of people. If it were, that would make it no longer a disorder, wouldn't it? Something normal instead of the abnormal.   
  
Skipping down the page, he saw another statement that made no sense to him whatsoever.  
  


> It is one thing if we are dealing with a type of activity that is unusual, without precedent among other animals, and restricted to peculiar types of individuals within the human population. It is another thing if the phenomenon proves to be a fundamental part, not only of human sexuality, but of mammalian patterns as a whole.

  
  
First, wasn't it? Restricted to peculiar individuals, that was - he certainly felt peculiar, he kind of always had, and other people had treated him as such. And the mentally ill were kind of by definition abnormal. If it was so fundamental to human sexuality, why was it considered an aberration, a condition to be treated, the people afflicted individuals to be pitied?  
  
Second...he was confused by the notion that animals could be homosexual. Animals didn't engage in erotic activity for pleasure the way humans did, it was solely instinct for procreation...wasn't it? His biology teacher last year had claimed so, at least. But he did take minor amusement in the mental image of homosexual animals in the world all around him - Mr. Henderson's lazy old dog, the two stray cats that seemed to wander the neighbourhood together at all times but that no one had ever gotten a good enough look at to know whether they were male or female. He almost smiled at the idea of the canary currently in his charge as the most junior Warbler being just as sexually inversed as he was - after all, the males were the ones of the species who sang sweet, high songs in a clear tone, just the way he did.  
  
But it did say "mammalian," he realized with a reluctant sigh. Fleta couldn't be a homosexual canary.  
  
The more he read, the less-at-ease he felt. For one thing, the report seemed to essentially say that everything psychologists believed was wrong but without any real basis for it except numbers that Kurt still maintained were too large to be real. For another, there was a lengthy tangent in the middle about men who were neither homosexual nor heterosexual that seemed to imply that  _that_ might be the true norm, and that didn't feel quite right to him. If he were homosexual, it was a fairly exclusive.  
  
By the time he completed the section, he was just... _torn._  On one hand, it seemed fantastic - a document saying he wasn't actually crazy...but at the same time, if one said he was a pervert and a sociopath and unlike most people, and the other said he was exactly like some 60% of people around him - completely normal as defined by a man for whom all sorts of behaviours Kurt would never consider were deemed equally normal...which was he meant to believe? The only grey area seemed to be the conclusion that he was mentally ill, but so was everyone else; that didn't sound quite right.  
  
The only legitimate solution, he concluded, was to find a third source to break the tie. He picked up the cards from the catalog and checked the next title: "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual." It was more recent than either of the previous sources, and if he were to literally judge a book by its cover, the title seemed to suggest that homosexuality was something to alter, at the very least. What else would there be to adjust?  
  
But 'Overt Homosexual' did seem to fit him, didn't it? He had never been particularly good at concealing himself in any way.  
  


> Current psychiatric and psychological opinion about the adjustment of the homosexual may be illustrated by a quotation from a report on homosexuality recently issued by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (1, p. 2): "When such homosexual behavior persists in an adult, it is then a symptom of a severe emotional disorder." If one wishes to subject this opinion to experimental investigation, one is immediately confronted by problems of considerable magnitude. One problem is the attitude and theoretical position of the clinician who may be asked to examine the data. I quote again from the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry in the same report (1, p. 4): "It is well known that many people, including physicians, react in an exaggerated way to sexual deviations and particularly to homosexuality with disgust, anger, and hostility. Such feelings often arise from the individual's own conflict centering about his unconscious homosexual impulses. These attitudes may interfere with an intelligent and objective handling of the problem." One hopes that the clinician does not react with "disgust, anger, and hostility." It is not realistic to hope that he will avoid theoretical preconceptions when looking at psychological material which he knows was obtained from a homosexual.

  
  
Kurt's posture tightened further and further with every word. If this was how the people offering psychiatric treatment responded, he was better off avoiding it alltogether. He would be better to just cut everything off and move to Europe to pursue a singing career. Better than standing in a room while the people in charge of making him better stated how emotionally disturbed he was. Unless he could somehow get rid of it in the next few years, before he reached adulthood- but that seemed unlikely, considering at the very least the comorbidity of his sexual inversion. If physicians reacted to him with the same disgust, anger, and hostility as everyone else around him...if none of them had been able to make him change his disgusting habits yet, why would someone with a medical degree approaching it the same way?   
  
But this woman was apparently different. She started by finding homosexuals who were not part of a psychiatric treatment - from the sounds of it, not part of treatment at all. They were part of an organization, something called the Mattachine, and Kurt wasn't sure what that was but could hear Finn calling it the Machete Society which made him smirk wryly. He filed the name away for later use as he continued reading. This Dr. Hooker had set out to compare heterosexual men to homosexual men and show whether homosexual men were less mentally stable-  
  
...and they weren't.  
  
The numbers were small, but even. There were descriptions of the doctors trying to distinguish the mental profiles of homosexuals from heterosexual men and being unable to do so - honestly? Kurt couldn't imagine ever being mistaken for a heterosexual boy...unless that other report had been right and almost no one actually was heterosexual, but he was still skeptical of that. No, if heterosexual was Finn and Puck and their friends, he was decidedly unlike them. If it was Jeff and Nick and Blaine and Wes and Thad, he was...still unlike them, certainly when discussing sexual disorders.  
  
But they weren't crazy. They weren't disturbed. They weren't maladjusted. They, presumably, lived lives that were deemed abnormal only by virtue of this erotic homosexual attraction.  
  
Then Kurt came to a paragraph that blew him away.  
  
Dr. Hooker described in detail (though anonymously) several of the study's participants. One, a man identified only as #16, was a highly-intelligent, razor sharp, and well-spoken. He was described as ethical and moral by every expert examining his record. In fact, the doctor who ranked him the lowest - essentially giving him a B if one could have a class in being well-adjusted - commented:  
  


> He gives an original twist to ordinary things. For him it is very important not to be conventional. He avoids it like the plague. He tries to keep it cool. I get the feeling that he wants to deny dependency. He has passive longings, but these would not fit in with his ego-ideal of being strong, superior, and wise. He would be able to be very rewarding emotionally. He does not wish to expose his aggression ordinarily, but would in relation to manly intellectual pursuits.

  
  
Kurt felt like that could be describing him. From the giving a twist to ordinary things - something he had prided himself on his entire life, whether in decorating a room or writing an essay - to being strong, superior, wise, and independent...those were his best and worst (well, previously-worst) qualities all rolled into one, simple explanation. In reality, it was describing a man in his forties who held multiple degrees in artistic fields and worked at both a college and managing a magazine...and was homosexual. In fact, the article said the man was in a "homosexual marriage," and while Kurt didn't know what that meant, he felt like he could imagine that somewhat - he would make a good Donna Reed, maybe. It certainly made more sense to him than the idea of coming home to find Mercedes cooking dinner while their children ran around the back yard, that was for sure; whatever flash of undefined future he saw, it felt closer to the nondescript term in the article than to anything else he'd seen.  
  


> If one brackets the fact that he is a homosexual, one would think of him as being a highly cultured, intelligent man who, though unconventional in his manner of living, exhibits no particular signs of pathology. He has never sought psychological or psychiatric help. He has been a homosexual from adolescence, with no heterosexual experience or inclination.

  
  
It was almost enough to make him cry. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fleta the canary is named for famous early-century tenor Miguel Fleta, as the infamous Pavarotti did not make his professional debut until 1961.


	7. Chapter 7

This wasn't happening.  
  
Quinn kept talking, standing there in the doorway of the garage, but all Finn heard was blood rushing in his ears and the sound of Burt lowering a car over in the far bay.  
  
And the word 'pregnant' echoing over and over again in his ears.  
  
He didn't understand. They hadn't done any of the things he thought could get a girl in trouble...at least, he didn't  _think_  they had. But they had fooled around in the back of the car quite a bit, especially at the drive-in (he probably was gonna live to regret that when Kurt finally got a girlfriend and wanted payback on the chaperon duties), and one time went a little too far, but he didn't think that was enough to-  
  
But she said it was. With that look like 'Ugh, Finn, you're such a moron, what is wrong with you?' that she got a lot when he was dumb. And he guessed he didn't really know that much about how it worked for girls, y'know, he got what happened with guys and everything but all he knew about girls was what Coach had drawn up on the blackboard that looked kinda like a cow's head or something with eggs in its ears. It was kinda confusing to try to figure out what part of that he might have gotten stuff on when he...exploded like that.  
  
He thought they were fine because they were still wearing clothes, and his jeans were pretty thick and stiff, but she said something about denim having holes and that was kinda true - after Kurt tried to explain something about thread count to him one time and showed him how to look and see where the strings went across on a piece of fabric, and there were pretty big ridges and strings and stuff in jeans, right? So he guessed.  
  
None of this would've happened if the mailman trick would've worked.   
  
"What are we going to do now?" he asked finally. His voice sounded stupid even to him, which meant he probably sounded even worse to her.  
  
"Nothing," she replied quietly, tears streaming down her cheeks. Was he supposed to hug her now? It was kinda his fault and all, but she seemed almost mad at the same time so it might not go well. She might not want him really near her too much. "I don't know."  
  
"Should we-...I dunno, maybe my mom will-"  
  
"No!" Her eyes narrowed, glaring up at him like she would kill him if he even suggested such a thing again. "No. We can't tell anyone. You understand? No one."  
  
"But aren't you, like, gonna start getting fat and stuff once it's growing in there?" His cousin had, he knew that, women around town, that girl his mom worked with.  
  
"Not yet," she replied, her voice a fierce, hoarse whisper. "We can't tell anyone. Not even your parents. Especially not either of our parents."  
  
"I just think we gotta-"  
  
"No," she repeated. "Why can't you get that, Finn? No. We're not telling them. They'll freak out."  
  
"But-"  
  
"I'm right, you're wrong. I'm smart, you're dumb. This is your fault anyway, if you hadn't-"  
  
"I already said I'm sorry like a thousand times for that, Quinn, I didn't mean to-"  
  
"I've gotta go," she said, shaking her head, arms crossing tighter over her chest. "Just don't tell anyone."  
  
He felt kinda dizzy and faint so he grabbed onto the edge of the counter. What was he supposed to do now? Start...getting stuff ready for the baby or something? Like guys did when their wives got pregnant? But Quinn wasn't his wife and most of the time those guys were like 20 and they weren't even close to that. He should call Puck. Puck would know what to do in all of this, with the way he got around? He'd probably been through this a couple times before. And Puck was his best friend, he would totally help in all this.  
  
"Anyone," Quinn repeated as she left. "Especially not Puck."  
  
...Crap. There went that plan.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt barely looked up when he heard books slam onto the table across from him, but his head jerked up when he heard the laugh that followed. Blaine stood beside the table, looking down in amusement, and Kurt felt a smile spread across his own face though he could never pinpoint exactly why that happened every time he saw the lead Warbler. "I thought for sure that would have gotten your attention," Blaine joked. "I'd been calling your name for at least five minutes."  
  
"Really."  
  
"Yeah." Blaine slid into the seat across from him and tried to read the page Kurt was looking at upside-down. "What are you working on? The past two weeks every time someone's looking for you, you're over here." He paused, then added, "Do you want me to start setting up one-on-ones or anything? I know the curriculum here is probably a lot to get used to, especially transferring in Junior year which is hardest-"  
  
"Oh, no," Kurt assured him. "No, classes are fine. This is better, actually." He smoothly closed the book, his hand coming to rest on top of it as he stated with a self-satisfied smile, "I'm figuring out what's wrong with Sam."  
  
"What do you mean?" Blaine asked.  
  
"Why he can know all the information but still do horribly on exams and assignments. He's not slow, it's something with the way he sees things and I swear I'm  _this_  close, but I keep running into walls. Say, you don't know anything about getting Warblers into a local medical school library, do you? I figure if you can get weekend passes the first week, anything's possible."  
  
"What is it you need?"  
  
"At this point? A decent medical dictionary." The school had almost everything else, even if it was all piecemeal and most of it was older so he couldn't guarantee any of the information was still accurate. After all, the older books said he was a sociopath and now he knew that part wasn't true, so who knew what else it could be wrong about?  
  
After finding the study with the mysterious Man #16, the one that said he didn't have to be emotionally disturbed or as crazy and nonfunctioning as a schizophrenic, he'd set out to devour everything else the library might be able to offer him on the topic of his...well, saying his 'condition' didn't really make as much sense if it turned out it wasn't a sickness, though he had learned that it was still listed in the giant book of mental illnesses so technically it was a condition. His differences- okay his differences beyond the obvious. Whatever he was choosing to call it for now, because that 'h' word still unnerved him a little and everything else was either a legal term, a religious term, a slur, or a combination of the three. In any event, he set out to read every piece of information the library had. That turned out to take approximately ten minutes, as there were exactly four items in the library with any reference to the topic at hand: the psychology book, the report on everyone having sex except for Kurt, a newspaper article about the numerous reasons it was illegal to open a bar in Columbus for 'deviants'...and the study that almost made up for the other three all on its own.   
  
So with those out of the way, he could turn his research time and attention back to his original question - diagnosing Sam - and leave the rest for that time between when Sam started snoring quietly and when he finally drifted off to sleep himself. In the dark room with no other pressing thoughts, he let himself be distracted by all the seemingly neverending questions.  
  
Was he sure he wasn't even a little crazy? Was that inversion thing still a problem, or did the fact that they were wrong about his attraction to males mean they were wrong about him being too feminine, too?   
  
Would he ever find anyone who would-...he didn't know how else to put it, but...want him? Want him the way Finn wanted Quinn or his dad wanted Carole. Want to hold his hand and maybe kiss him.  
  
Was there even anyone else out there?  
  
He knew there were obviously at least 30, thanks to that study. There were at least 30 somewhere...but how many others? Because all of those 30 were significantly older than he was, and how would he even find them in a country of 175 million people? How did he even go about finding people like him? He couldn't exactly go up and  _ask_  people, and he'd never known anyone who was enough like him that he could reasonably guess. And, he figured, if therapists and experts couldn't tell who was or wasn't like him, what chance did he stand?  
  
Because even as great as it felt to know he wasn't psychotic and he wasn't a dangerous attacker without even knowing it...it didn't help the feeling of isolation. He knew he should be used to it, he'd been alone practically his entire life - except for his dad and the Joneses, of course - and he couldn't help but wish-  
  
Someday, he told himself with a sigh in the darkness every night. Man #16 found someone, somewhere, sometime, and he might, too. But Man #16 was more than twice his age; he had time.  
  
So for now he sat in the library every evening and poured over medical textbooks and wished he could translate any of them into something an actual person might say so that he could understand if what he was reading about applied to Sam or not. He felt like he was ruling a lot out, but not nearly enough.  
  
"Really?" Blaine asked. "I'll bring you one after fall break if you want."  
  
"You have one lying around?"  
  
"My father's a psychiatrist. I can't guarantee how updated it is, but he has a couple."  
  
Kurt wondered if Blaine's father was the kind of psychiatrist who believed in the first book, or one of the ones like the study. Though it didn't entirely matter, he realized; if the study taught him anything, it was that he didn't have to see a doctor even if this was technically an illness. Man #16 hadn't and he was perfectly fine and well-adjusted. He knew it was kind of ridiculous to cling to an unknown patient in a psychological study like this, but he couldn't entirely help it. Who else was he going to look to? Who else was there? It wasn't as though he had ever met someone else like him who could reassure him that he might not be miserable forever. Man #16, wherever he was, was eccentric, unconventional, happy, and not alone - everything Kurt could hope to be. So there he was, this almost-fictional beacon of theoretical hope. A liferaft.  
  
"That would be great. Thank you." Kurt smiled and reached up to flick his hair back as he settled in his chair. "So what brings you over here?"  
  
"I've come to rescue you."  
  
Kurt's heart surged a little, though he couldn't figure out quite why, and he was careful to keep his face and voice even as he replied "Oh?"  
  
"You need a break. Believe me, it's easy to go stir-crazy in here. And if you're not holing up here because you're trying to study, then even more reason to spring you."  
  
Two weeks of barely seeing each other had left Kurt more lonely than he realized; he missed seeing Blaine all the time, and the prospect of spending the rest of the evening with him sounded fantastic. "I could use a break," he allowed, standing smoothly and grabbing his notebook. It was nearly filled with notes, scribbled medical terms, and potential diagnoses crossed out as he figured out reasons they couldn't be the problem. By contrast, his notes for school were much fewer and further between.  
  
"Anything in particular you'd like to do?"  
  
Kurt thought a moment, then suggested, "You still have the Garland at the Grove in your room?"  
  
Blaine froze. That wasn't in the plan. The plan that had been working so well the past few weeks - the plan where he avoided Kurt and the feelings went away, the one that had been going swimmingly when Kurt barricaded himself in the library...spending all evening with Kurt sprawled out on his bed was  _not_  going to work for him.  
  
But the idea of  _not_  spending the evening with him...  
  
He missed Kurt. Not in a romantic or sexual way, just...he  _missed_  him. They'd gone from hanging out together a decent amount during Kurt's first two weeks at school, to not seeing each other except at rehearsals. And Kurt was the only person he knew at Dalton who had similar taste in music to his.  
  
Besides. If there was one thing they were used to doing together, it was singing. There was nothing inherently untoward about any of that. He'd been keeping it together, staying cool, feeling perfectly normal at Warblers practice. He would be fine.  
  
"Yeah," Blaine replied. "You want to bring Star is Born?" he added, not minding in the least that he was prolonging the evening with the addition of another album.   
  
* * * * *  
  
More and more, Kurt found himself without adequate words.  
  
It frustrated him. He had always been an articulate child, growing into a teenager who used increasingly verbose insults while most of his peers turned monosyllabic, and while he rarely knew the  _right_  thing to say, it was rarely because he couldn't find the correct words to express what it was he was feeling or thinking.  
  
Except these days.   
  
It was just that he had this feeling-...not even a  _feeling_  so much as a sense, an instinct based on something completely intangible, that Blaine was like him.  
  
Not just like him as in they had similar interests - that was easy to pinpoint as he sat on the rug by Blaine's bed, Blaine sprawled beside him, while they listened to Judy singing "Day In, Day Out" on the record player on the desk. At the very least they had similar taste in music, though not identical (Blaine listened to a lot more popular music and not quite as many Broadway classics, but he didn't dislike them like Finn or Sam did), and movies (Blaine was the only other boy who spoke adoringly about Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina). And Blaine read Vogue, which was  _amazing_  to Kurt because it was one of his secret obsessions and he was just glad to have someone to share it with. But what Kurt was feeling wasn't as simple as that, because they had plenty of different interests. Blaine didn't care about his own fashion, and he liked football (to watch, not to play), and he didn't care about cars which Kurt had developed some interest in thanks to his dad's shop, and Kurt was sure there were plenty of other areas in which their interests diverged. So they had more in common with each other than Kurt had in common with any other boy he had ever met, including Sam, but there was something more to it than that.  
  
A connection. A... _something_. A feeling like Kurt was safe around him. Something about Blaine that made him feel like he could let his guard down, which was a huge deal for him. Years of public school torture and humiliation by larger boys had taught him to stay distant, to not care so much, to trust few people and only after they'd earned it. Blaine shattered all of that practically in minutes, and there had to be some reason for that. Something beyond merely being vulnerable in a new place, because no one else at Dalton had done it to the same extent. Not even Sam, who was the guy Kurt knew most intimately - roommates had kind of their own special relationship.  
  
But his and Blaine's was deeper than that.   
  
He didn't understand how or why. It wasn't friendship, not precisely - he'd had friends, though not great in number, and it was a similar feeling but not quite the same. Certainly not this  _early_  in the friendship. And it wasn't just Blaine's charismatic charm, his disarming smile, his kind eyes that always looked excited, as though you could just tell he actually wanted to listen to you.  
  
He wasn't sure if he was imagining things, but it seemed like Blaine got that look more with  _him_  than with any of the other Warblers. Blaine always looked engaged, but with him it seemed more intense somehow. But then, he had imagined that Finn liked him a lot more than he actually had, and the memories of the pain of figuring out that the friendship he'd thought they were forging was little more than a forced truce for sake of the glee club and their parents...Kurt was reluctant to jump back into assumptions like that.  
  
But if he was trying so hard to be cautious...why did he want to tell Blaine everything? What was it about Blaine that made him want to spill every secret he had? Even  _that_  one?  
  
...oh god. Was that what-  
  
No. Well...maybe. How would he even know?   
  
Was Blaine like him like... _like_  him?   
  
Kurt's head jerked towards him in surprised, and Blaine looked up at him. "What?"  
  
"Nothing," Kurt stammered. "Just...haven't heard this song in awhile," he lied poorly as "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" came on. "So which one's your favourite?" he asked, knowing the segue was imperfect but at least it was distracting in a way that Blaine might not follow up on what was causing Kurt to look at him like that. because that was a conversation he didn't begin to know how to have...and he doubted he ever would.  
  
"Favourite what?" Blaine asked. "Song, album, movie?"  
  
"Any of them."  _Anything to keep you talking_  Kurt added as he felt the familiar warm sensation he got whenever Blaine smiled at him. Like he was tingling all over and his cheeks were on fire and he couldn't quite breathe but in a good way.   
  
"Hm. This is tough," Blaine said, thinking a moment. "Okay, movie's easy - Wizard of Oz. It's a classic, and the first one I ever saw of hers. Whenever there's a theater replaying it, I have to go. Album...probably this one, though I am a sucker for the soundtrack to Meet Me in St. Louis. Song..." Blaine hesitated, his lips curling into something like a small, awkward smile, though significantly more nervous. "She sang this version of 'Smile' live on some show once, and it was the most incredible...musical moment I've ever heard. Like you could feel everything she was feeling right there through the television. The other versions of the song seem so light, but when she sings about pasting on a smile to conceal everything that hurts and forcing yourself to go on, you can just hear it and  _know_ that's what she's doing right at that moment." His voice was quiet, and Kurt leaned in a little closer - not much, just enough. Blaine glanced at him, then admitted, "I do that sometimes. When I sing. Because up there, performing in front of people, it's like you can be whoever you want and you don't have to be yourself for awhile. Everything you don't like about who you are can just...go away for those three or four minutes. It's just you, and the music, and how the music makes you feel."  
  
Kurt wondered what in the world Blaine could not like about himself; everything he saw about Blaine, he liked so much - even now. Especially now. Something about the boy being quiet and self-reflective was almost entrancing, as though if Kurt looked away it would take a part of him and he could never get it back.   
  
"I know it sounds stupid," Blaine added, shaking his head and rolling his eyes at himself.  
  
"It's not," Kurt replied quietly. "I do that too, sometimes. It's why I love musicals - the emotion. Don't get me wrong, pop songs are fun to sing, and the Warblers do them incredibly well. But there's something about the feeling behind a great Broadway ballad that's just so much... _more_."  
  
"Exactly." Blaine's smile was returning, though it was more shy than Kurt was used to. "Like in West Side Story, you know, you can  _feel_  Tony falling in love with Maria and  _feel_  the agony of the death scene, the longing in 'Somewhere' - you don't even have to watch them. It's all in their voices, in the songs."  
  
Blaine was the first person Kurt had ever known who understood that, and he couldn't help but smile. Maybe this was why he felt the connection to Blaine. Maybe it had nothing to do with that other thing he was slowly coming to terms with (though a part of his brain did seem to enjoy shouting  _I bet that's the part he doesn't like! He doesn't know about Man #16!_  over and over again, no matter how much Kurt wanted it to shut up), maybe it was because Blaine was the only other person who connected to music the way he did. Mercedes loved singing and sounded amazing when she did it, and she was incredibly proud of her voice - as she had every right to be...but it wasn't emotional for her in the same way it was for him. The same with Finn, he liked being part of glee club and sang lead well, but it was always more of a hobby than an outlet.  
  
It was just that music said so much more than words could. Even when he could find the right words for the job, there were so many limitations, so many things they couldn't express and so much depth that was lost when there was no music to go with them. It was like music could turn up the volume on an emotion from 4 to 10 with barely any effort. Blaine was the first person he'd ever met who understood that.  
  
Maybe that was what all of this was - what it felt like to connect with someone musically. Maybe that's why it was like a friendship but not quite, it was more like some strange Broadway world where everything felt deeper.   
  
The song changed again, and so did Blaine's face. It was back to being bright, expressive in a more stage-friendly way, and he grinned. "Oh, I love this song. Do you know it?"  
  
Of course Kurt had heard [Zing! Went the Strings of my Heart](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3aQtw2jIwc) before, though it wasn't one of the ones he listened to often as it wasn't on any of the albums he owned. "Sort of," he replied.  
  
"It's one of the first ones she ever did, but one of the only ones from when she was young that she still performs. I just love it - ballads are beautiful and everything, but I love upbeat music, you know?" Blaine grinned winningly and began to sing along. The roughness of his voice didn't mesh particularly well with Judy's, but Kurt could imagine how great Blaine would sound on the song on his own. Maybe not with the Warblers, it would lose a lot in the lack of orchestration, but somewhere, someday, on stage with this song and that  _grin_ \- God, Kurt felt like he would turn into a puddle of goo just seeing it.  
  
 _Dear when you smiled at me  
I heard a melody  
It haunted me from the start  
Something inside of me  
Started a symphony  
Zing! went the strings of my heart_  
  
He wasn't sure how the song managed to read his mind like that, managed to sum up so perfectly how he felt the first time he saw Blaine...and every time thereafter, if Kurt were to be honest with himself. Of course, it got exponentially more intense whenever Blaine sang - but that was what they'd been talking about earlier with music in general, wasn't it? It just amplified whatever else was already there, whatever words or emotions were underneath it.   
  
Or maybe it had more to do with the way that Blaine came alive when he sang. Unless it was all an act, all a facade like he was saying...no, Kurt concluded. Blaine had said  _sometimes_  he pasted on the smile and performed to get away from everything, not  _all_ the time. And the entire point about the song Blaine liked was that you could feel what Judy was feeling when she sang it, that kind of desperate attempt at making herself feel better by pretending to be okay - this felt genuine. It sounded real and it sounded like...like whatever it was that Kurt was feeling that he couldn't figure out the words for.  
  
 _Twas like a breath of spring  
I heard a robin sing  
About a nest set apart  
All nature seemed to be  
In perfect harmony  
Zing! went the strings of my heart_  
  
The way Blaine touched his arm was different. And the kind of smile, and just-  _everything_. It was like-...well, it was like the way Mercedes' brother acted when that girl from two doors down came to ask if she could borrow his notes from science class. No one in the universe actually thought she needed to borrow notes, they just wanted to see each other, and they both would smile in this kind of ridiculous way and look at each other really intensely and just be so  _flirty_  about it all. That was the way Blaine looked at him when he sang was...was  _flirty_.   
  
...maybe. He wasn't actually sure. He hadn't exactly had anyone flirt with him before. For that matter, he hadn't had boys singing songs in his direction before, so for all he knew this was just the way boys sang. And it looked about like Blaine did during the first number he ever saw the Warblers perform, so maybe this was just the way Blaine sang in general, and it wasn't specific to him.   
  
He wanted to do it back but had no idea how as he stared intently at Blaine, blushing when their eyes met, feeling like he should be looking away but not quite able to bring himself to do it for more than a second or two.  
  
 _Your eyes made skies seem blue again  
What else could I do again  
But keep repeating, "Through and through  
I love you, love you!"_  
  
And suddenly Kurt couldn't breathe.  
  
Love? That was what this feeling was? Did that-...he wasn't sure, he couldn't be certain, and it felt so ridiculous to say that because everyone knew what love was...or they were meant to, at least, and he loved his father and probably Mercedes-  
  
...he didn't want to kiss either of them, though. He didn't want to lean over and grab either of them, and he didn't get erections when he thought about either of them ( _ew_ ), and he didn't-  
  
So was that what this was? Because it seemed ridiculous, but there was the same kind of gasping relief sensation when the word was put to feeling that he had when he finally connected a word to his identity, so that had to mean something, right?  
  
 _I still recall the thrill  
I guess I always will  
I hope 'twill never depart  
Dear with your lips to mine  
A rhapsody divine  
Zing! went the strings of my heart_  
  
"Dance with me," Blaine urged, grinning as he stood.  
  
"Ohhh no," Kurt replied, shaking his head. "I can't dance."  
  
"Oh, c'mon." His almost-pout as he started to do a softshoe number around the bed during the musical interlude was enough to make Kurt want to reconsider his policy against dancing. He shifted himself up onto the edge of the bed. Mostly he just couldn't take his eyes off Blaine.  
  
Was he in love with him? Was that what this was? Was the difference between loving, again, his father or his grandparents or someone like that, and loving Blaine...was it that part about erotic attraction? Because that would make sense.  
  
It was. That was absolutely what this was. He was-  
  
He was in love with Blaine.   
  
Blaine began to sing the break again, practically staring  _through_  him it was that intense, and Kurt had to remind himself to keep breathing.  
  
 _Your eyes made skies seem blue again  
What else could I do again-_  
  
Unbidden, Kurt began to mouth the words along with Blaine, his voice seemingly unable to even creep out as he tried to declare,  
  
 _But keep repeating, "Through and through  
I love you, love you!"_  
  
Blaine's grin got even bigger as he saw Kurt singing along - or maybe because he got what Kurt was trying to say, he didn't even know, and he was practically beaming as he sang the last verse.  
  
 _I still recall the thrill  
I guess I always will  
I hope 'twill never depart  
Dear with your lips to mine  
A rhapsody divine  
Zing! went the strings of my-  
Zing! went the strings of my-  
Zing! went the strings of my heart!_  
  
He finished the song with a flourish and Kurt applauded dutifully - okay, maybe more like spastically, he felt like the grin on his face might seriously break his cheeks. As Blaine sat down, cheeks flushed, smiling from ear to ear and just ecstatic with the kind of post-performance rush that Kurt knew too well, it was apparent that this hadn't been a forced performance, something about trying to paste on a smile and convince himself he could be okay if he performed hard enough. He was enjoying himself, which meant...  
  
...that meant he meant this, right?  
  
Kurt wanted to lean over and just-...just see what it would feel like to kiss him. It was one of those moments like in a movie, where the boy and the girl have been staring at each other all night and they're so close and all it would take is moving just a little bit, just leaning in, and then the entire world would explode with possibility. Did it work the same if they were both boys? Who made the first move? He had no idea, and he wasn't entirely sure he cared.   
  
But what he did care about was a question he had no answer to:  
  
What if Blaine wasn't.... _like him_?  
  
What if this really was all just about musical connection and Blaine really did like that- that  _Laura_  girl he'd gone out with a few weeks ago? What if all of this was just Kurt reading too much into things, like he had into his friendship with Finn, and Blaine didn't-  
  
He didn't know what happened if he guessed wrong, but he didn't think it would be a good idea. He didn't know what Blaine might do, but he was certain of exactly one thing: It wouldn't. be. okay. Whatever action happened after that, it would be  _bad_ , and he had the nagging feeling it wasn't just because then others might know his secret.  
  
He couldn't do this until he had more knowledge. Until he knew for sure that Blaine wasn't going to shove him away and tell everyone and have him discharged on medical grounds or something like that, he-...he couldn't. It wouldn't be alright. It wouldn't be  _safe_.  
  
Instead he settled back on the floor awkwardly, in the same position he had, as Purple People Eater began. Maybe he could force himself to pretend he was okay if he sang enough happy songs. Maybe it would distract him enough to forget how desperately he  _wanted_.


	8. Chapter 8

As ridiculous as it sounded, even in his own mind, Kurt was beginning to feel like kind of an expert at putting words to previously-undefinable conditions. He was just thankful that, for once, it wasn't all about him.  
  
At approximately 9:47 on Thursday, with exactly 13 minutes to spare before he would have to leave the library and not return until classes were out on Tuesday, he finally found what he had been looking for: an abstract in a medical journal from 1951 - and seriously, where were the items in Dalton's library coming from, because the assortment seemed entirely random and not necessarily useful. After all, if an alumnus had decided to donate the following month's journal instead of this one or something, he would never have found the information he needed. Or maybe he was missing some crucial piece of the puzzle that would have helped him figure out what was wrong earlier. In any event, he supposed he should just be lucky he found it. At least, he thought he had.   
  
He walked quickly, with short, sure steps, across the library and stood across from Sam. "Let's go."  
  
"We still have-"  
  
"I found it."  
  
Sam's head jerked up, eyes wide. "Y-...you did?"  
  
"Yes. I think so, at least, it's not entirely easy to tell without a background in medicine, but this sounds like everything you said." A student at the next table over shushed him loudly, and Kurt rolled his eyes, dropping his voice to a whisper. "So come on."  
  
Sam hurriedly gathered his books, shoving papers into their folders and grabbing his pencils and pens into his tightly-clenched fist. It wasn't until they were walking out the front doors of the library that Sam finally spoke again. "Is it...you know. Something bad?"  
  
He looked so damned nervous that Kurt wanted to hug him, because he knew that feeling. The panic that something was badly wrong with you- that the problem making your life miserable was incurable, unfixable, and not something you could ever talk about... "No," Kurt assured him, meeting his eyes. "At least, I don't think so. Not from the article I found."  
  
Sam's relief was almost tangible as his tight, nervous smile turned into a more genuine grin, and Kurt couldn't help but smile. He remembered how amazing that feeling was - how incredible he had found when he saw the paragraph about the man who had come to symbolize everything he could be.   
  
He wondered suddenly if maybe Blaine didn't know. If Blaine was like him - and he wasn't entirely sure why he thought, he wasn't sure how precisely he would know, but the feeling persisted...if Blaine was like him, maybe Blaine didn't know what he was yet. After all, Kurt only knew because he had found those four documents that told him, and if Blaine hadn't seen those-  
  
Or  _worse_ , if Blaine had only seen the textbook? Or books and articles that said the same thing as the textbook?  
  
He had no idea how to bring it up, was the problem. What precisely was he meant to do? Say "Hey, Blaine, have you ever had erotic and/or romantic feelings towards a man? If so, there's something you should know!"? Not hardly, and not just because he couldn't imagine saying the word 'erotic' out loud to  _anyone_ , least of all someone who already kind of made him blush just by existing. But what if he was right? What if he was right and Blaine was going through his entire life not even knowing what else was out there?   
  
That was stupid, he told himself, almost rolling his eyes. Blaine was older than he was and seemed a lot more savvy about...well, most social things, at any rate. He probably hadn't spent most of his formative years sitting around with one girl singing showtunes the way Kurt had - he'd had friends and groups of people the way most boys did, the way Finn or his buddies did. Blaine almost certainly knew what - if anything - he was. And if he wasn't noticing Kurt being completely head-over-heels, stupidly, blissfully in love with him to the point where he started grinning and blushing if he so much as thought the  _name_  "Blaine"...then that meant there was a decent chance that Blaine knew what he was and that wasn't what Kurt was. Maybe-  
  
...maybe he really did like that Laura girl. Kurt's stomach twisted at the thought, but he didn't-  
  
"Kurt?" Sam's voice snapped him out of his daydream - okay, more like a nightmare as he pictured Blaine escorting some girl around where he should be. "...You said it wasn't bad, but you kinda...look like you're gonna throw up or something, so you're kinda freaking me out here."  
  
"What?" Kurt blinked. "Oh! Right. I'm sorry, I was just distracted - I've been spending too long in that library, I don't know how you do it without going crazy." The lies came easier now, and a part of him felt like he must have always been telling them but it felt different now. The little pangs of frustration with each thing he said that he knew wasn't true - or wasn't nearly the whole truth - felt like they were building and collecting. It had only been two weeks of knowing they were lies, and already it was starting to ache when he realized that it didn't even occur to him to say what he was really thinking.  
  
He'd always done it; it just felt different now. Dirtier. Scarier.  
  
Sam was still staring at him, the worried expression back on his face, so Kurt drew in a deep breath and tried to focus on the topic at hand. This was important. Making sure Sam knew he wasn't wrong was  _important_. Crucial, even.  
  
The rest could wait.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"You're sure your family or whoever doesn't mind a stowaway?" Sam asked as he shoved a few pairs of casual pants into his bag.  
  
"No, I asked my dad on Tuesday," Kurt replied. "Considering you live less than five miles from where I do, it doesn't make any sense to make your parents come all the way out here."  
  
"My parents live there," Sam corrected.  
  
"Hm?"  
  
"They live five miles from your parents; I don't live there." He leaned over to the desk, contemplating the stack of comics, then reluctantly set them down and grabbed his math book instead. "Sorry. I'm just not looking forward to the questions about how my grades are so far."  
  
"But you know what the problem is now," Kurt pointed out. The clothing options in his closet were all so tempting, and he wasn't entirely sure which ones to select - and that was to say nothing of the clothing options still at home. He was tempted to take a few of the things from his armoire with him to swap them out, bring new ones back, but he hadn't had enough of an opportunity to wear any of them to feel like he wanted to switch yet. There were distinct disadvantages to Dalton sometimes.  
  
"Yeah, but I don't know that saying 'It's not my fault, Mom and Dad, I have this thing called dyslexia and Kurt thinks you should take me to a specialist at Ohio State' is gonna win me enough points, y'know?" Sam rolled his eyes.   
  
"You should take a night off, at least. Relax a little."  
  
"With who? I don't know anyone out there - I've been here for two years and was down near Cinci before that."  
  
Kurt thought a moment. He had already been contemplating a night out with the New Directions gang plus Mercedes, and he knew that any night out during his second weekend at home since August was going to go over better if Finn was with him anyway - family bonding or whatnot...and Sam was bound to get along with  _some_  of them, at least. His interest in sports would help him with Finn and Puck, and everyone at the table would be interested in music... He smiled. "Don't you worry about that. You're coming out with a group of us on Saturday. In fact- I may set you up with one of the girls. She's...slow. And shallow. But you need to learn to interact with attractive young women."  
  
"I do fine."  
  
Kurt gave him a deadpan look. "The last time you spoke with one was...when, precisely?"  
  
Sam blushed and rolled his eyes. "Okay, fine."  
  
"You'd look cute together, too - you're both blond. But you'll come out with us, we're just going to have dinner or something. It'll be fun."  
  
Sam hesitated, then a smile spread slowly across his face as he contemplated a night off. "Yeah," he replied. "Yeah, okay. Sounds like fun."  
  
"Great," Kurt replied. Selecting only a few articles of clothing and deciding to wear the rest from his sizable closet at home, he began to gather his homework. Who assigned so much over a holiday? It was kind of cruel, he thought, but what could a person do? "Have you seen my physics book?"   
  
Sam checked the front cover of the book on his bed and shook his head. "No, this one's mine. Sorry."   
  
Kurt checked under his suitcase, then in his bag, then checked on his desk again. Nothing. He tried to remember when he'd last had it - not in the library, he didn't think, he'd finished his reading before the end of the day which meant- "In the office," he sighed. "I'll be right back." He pulled on his jacket and toed on his loafers, then checked the time. "If my stepmother gets here, tell her I'll be less than five minutes." He rolled his eyes and quickly strode out of the room, hurrying towards the main building.   
  
Campus was surprisingly quiet for mid-afternoon on a Friday, even though classes had only let out at noon so there should theoretically have been more people around. A few boys carried suitcases towards the parking lot, but everyone else seemed to have either left already or to be lying low until their rides arrived in the evening. The main building seemed almost too still for the loud echo of his shoes against the floor, and he cringed at the amplified sound as he got to the stairwell and it his steps seemed all the noisier. Trailing his fingers down the banister as he descended, he found himself daydreaming about an entire weekend back home - family dinner tonight, probably spending most of Saturday with Mercedes, Saturday night out with everyone...even if he didn't particularly like most of them when he went to McKinley, he still missed them so much now that he was two hours away. Then Sunday at the shop where he could mock Finn for still being confused by the finer points of engine reassembly that he had learned when he was about ten, followed by a lazy Monday before riding back in the evening. Probably with time built in for shopping, which he missed even though he knew he wouldn't have much use for purchases other than pajamas as long as he was at Dalton; that wasn't the point.  
  
He strode confidently through the suite of offices dedicated to student organizations; the Warblers' office was one of the larger ones, even if Wes was right and there wasn't really room for everyone to put all of their things there during the day. It was also a corner office, which Thad thought was a big deal, even though none of the offices had windows because it was part of an interior maze of hallways. With a faint smile and a shake of his head, he pulled open the door-  
  
"Blaine." Kurt wasn't sure why he was so surprised to see him there, but it felt so...unexpected, just running into him like that. Not like they hadn't run into each other a few dozen times in the previous week just because it was a small enough campus and they had enough friends in common (well...Blaine was friends with them; Kurt didn't know them well enough for that yet, but they were mutually pleasant acquaintances at any rate) that it was hardly a strange occurrence, and yet something about it made him feel caught off-guard. Maybe because the first thing he did was start blushing and, had he been adequately prepared to run into Blaine, he would have steeled himself against that first.  
  
It didn't always work, but it was better than chancing it. His skin, when given its way, would always turn the reddest it could without him looking like he was bursting into flames.   
  
Blaine looked up suddenly from his homework. "Hey," he replied stiffly, looking... _nervous_? Was that what the kind of lopsided, awkward, plastered-on grin was meant to signify?   
  
...did Blaine even  _get_  nervous? Kurt wondered. He'd never seen it before and the boy seemed to always be so damned confident in a way he completely admired and envied. So confident and comfortable in his skin and his surroundings. Blaine wouldn't do something stupid like almost accidentally knock over an entire tray of salad bowls because he was surprised to see Kurt appear out of nowhere.  
  
...which Kurt hadn't done, he would like it known, he just...almost did. And it wasn't just because Blaine clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder or anything. He was surely distracted by something else.  
  
"Hello," Kurt replied awkwardly.   
  
"What are you doing here?"  
  
"Forgot my physics book yesterday. I needed to come grab it before I went home for the weekend." It was getting harder to act like he didn't want to throw himself in Blaine's general direction. Or to not smile like a fool as soon as they were in the same room. Or to not do something  _really_  stupid like ask the questions he kept wanting to ask - if Blaine was...or liked...or might like...or had ever...or any number of things that were just plain inappropriate and would result in certain unspecified disaster if he were wrong.  
  
"Oh." Blaine glanced around, then picked up the book from the top of the bookcase filled with sheet music. "This one?"  
  
"Looks like," Kurt replied. He took a few steps forward to take it; Blaine didn't make the kind of intense eye contact the way he had a few days earlier, listening to that song (Kurt did believe he had a new alltime favourite song, by the way), but it was still enough to make him feel glued in place, like he couldn't bring himself to tear his eyes away. "And you?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"What are you doing here?"  
  
"Hiding out," Blaine replied, a more genuine smile dancing in his eyes, and Kurt consciously reminded himself that swooning was not attractive and would surely result in him hitting his head on some heavy piece of wooden furniture. The office was definitely not big enough for a movie heroine's grand gestures.   
  
"I would've thought you'd left already," Kurt stated. Most of the richer boys had - what with having drivers or butlers or valets or whatnot. Only the boys with families who couldn't drop everything midday but also couldn't send someone to fetch their beloved son remained.  
  
"Edgar's coming at four sharp," Blaine replied with a roll of his eyes that made Kurt think there had been a lecture of some kind associated with that news. Mostly he just couldn't get over the fact that he seriously knew someone with a butler named Edgar.  
  
...maybe, he realized. It was possible that wasn't how things were at all, even if Blaine's dad  _was_  a doctor. After all, a few years ago Mrs. Jones would have been the one to come pick him up, and people would have made assumptions because there seemed to be a black employee of the family coming to fetch him, but that wouldn't have been even close to the real story.   
  
"Looking forward to going home?" Kurt asked, and Blaine's look told him everything he needed to know, even if it didn't entirely satisfy his curiosity. Was he the only boy at Dalton who was looking forward to a weekend with his family? Sam acted like it was a horribly oppressive obligation, Blaine wasn't seeming much better...he was practically jumping for joy at getting to leave for a few days and see his family, his  _friends_ , to go do all the simple, normal things he'd taken for granted before August.   
  
"You know," Kurt said before he knew exactly what he was saying or why, "If you wanted something to do this weekend - I mean, I assume you have plans and people to see back home, but if you didn't - you could always come out to Lima. You'd get two Warblers for the price of one, and it's not all that far."  
  
It was a ridiculous offer, the kind a child would make - "You look like you want to pout about going home, come to my house instead" - and he couldn't figure out what even made him say it...except for the fact that four days without seeing Blaine or laughing at something he said or feeling his hand on his arm felt like a lifetime and somehow was almost enough to make him wish they didn't have this break.  
  
Almost. If it weren't for how much he missed the quiet of having his own bedroom, it would have definitely been enough. Okay, and maybe how much he missed his dad, but still. The contest was far too close considering how little time he and Blaine had known each other.  
  
Blaine's smile was faint, tight. "While I'm sure your plans for the weekend are much more fun than mine will be...that probably won't be an option. But thank you for the offer." He reached out to touch Kurt's arm, and Kurt was unable to keep the grin off his face at the contact and the way it made his stomach jump just a little - in a good way. He was still getting used to the idea that it felt that good.  
  
"It still stands - if you change your mind." Kurt drew in a deep breath and forced himself to take a step back. "My stepmother's probably here, I should..."  
  
"Of course," Blaine replied. "Have fun. See you Monday night maybe?"  
  
"Yeah, maybe," Kurt replied, the stupid grin still on his face. "I should go."  
  
"Yeah, I got that." Blaine's teasing grin - had he repeated himself? Oh. Maybe he had. Right. - made him roll his eyes a little, but he forced himself to turn and leave.  
  
What was  _with_  him? He was better at being pulled-together than this. Ugh. He had turned into everything ridiculous that girls did when they kind of obsessively liked a boy. He was turning into  _Rachel Berry_ , with her completely obvious love of Finn despite his very serious longterm relationship with Quinn that wasn't going to end any time soon - the way she practically turned into a giant ball of sappy, adoring fan that made her sing ridiculous declarations of love to Finn in front of everyone...  
  
...he was so not above doing that right now, and that was never a good sign.  
  
He rolled his eyes at himself as he walked back down the hall.   
  
...he couldn't skip. It would be too obvious if someone rounded a corner suddenly, if only because his bouncy, uneven steps would echo too much.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Of the many things Blaine enjoyed about living at Dalton, the one that always felt like the biggest luxury was talking and joking during meal time. It was a stupid little thing that shouldn't have mattered, he knew that, and of all the  _big_  things - the ability to come and go more or less as he pleased, being surrounded by a lot of people instead of the kind of isolation that came from being an only child, having a purpose and something to do to fill almost every minute of the day...it was the idea of meals as a respite, a recharging period, that always stood out. The idea that, after an excrutiatingly long morning of classes (because who in their right minds thought that advanced biology followed by calculus followed by the most boring U.S. history teacher in the universe was a reasonable schedule?), lunch time was his opportunity to talk and joke and listen to the other Warblers talk and joke and tease each other about stupid things one or more of them had said during the day...about nothing in particular, really. They didn't even discuss Warblers business at lunch, despite Wes's attempts to the contrary. There was an understanding that, in a world of too many schedules and too much to do, lunch was a time for them to just enjoy each others' company.  
  
He thought about that as he sat stiffly at his parents' dining table. Despite the fact that there were only three of them, they insisted on eating always in the formal dining room despite the fact that there was a perfectly serviceable table in the breakfast nook. A table that, he was fairly certain, he was the only one to ever use and even then only when he was the only one around. While there was no photographic evidence, he knew that when he was at school? His parents still ate at this table that was best suited for ten - his father at the head, his mother at the foot, and just some centerpieces and eight feet of polished wood between them.  
  
Maybe that was why they never spoke much at mealtimes. It practically required shouting to be heard from one end to the other.   
  
He got the impression that his parents almost wished they'd had a second child so the table would be more balanced; it was almost impossible to plan well when there was someone who wasn't properly coupled off, and before a certain age it was just inappropriate to have family friends bring an extra person - he could only imagine what psychological justification his father would have given about trying to pair him off with a nice girl at age 11 during the annual Christmas party for sake of an even table.  
  
During the summers he got used to it all - the silence, the strain, the formal dress code even during a weeknight dinner for the three of them - and when he was younger he hadn't known enough to think it was unusual. But when it was just for a few days, just a weekend, the reentry from his gloriously loud world into this echoing chasm of silence left him feeling perpetually out of sorts. If he'd had the option to stay at Dalton all weekend, he would have gladly taken it, but for some reason this was the rule that even Warblers couldn't get around.  
  
So at precisely the stroke of 7, dressed in a dark suit with a striped tie and immaculately-shined shoes, he made his way down the grand staircase in the foyer and into the dining room. His mother was already there, staring off into space as she sat at the foot of the table, a hi-ball of some type of pre-dinner spirits resting in her curled hand, her perfectly-manicured nails just barely tapping at the glass. She was a beautiful woman - tall and slim, still towering over him even now that he had reached what he was beginning to reluctantly acknowledge was probably his full height, with silky blonde hair that her expert stylist kept looking like Grace Kelly's. Her poise and elegance were beyond compare with the kind of perfection that came from being an empty shell of a human being. Who needed to work at being without fault when there wasn't an ounce of person left inside to make things messy, to screw things up? Say what you want about chlorpromazine and its ilk, but it had turned his mother from a woman who laughed too loudly and occasionally lost her temper into the perfect robot of a wife who attended every function and luncheon and shook every hand without so much as a flicker of recognition of anything distasteful like emotions.  
  
He wasn't sure he remembered what she'd been like before, not anymore. Not by now. It had been almost his entire life, he knew that, and to this day he didn't know the whole story. He remembered sitting at the top of the stairs after he was meant to be in bed as he usually did, and hearing her yelling. Upset about something. He heard her; the entire house heard her, all the guests...and then his father, ever the psychiatrist, had taken her to a colleague and gotten her set up with something lovely to calm her nerves. He still didn't know what had made her snap that night, though there had been rumours at subsequent parties about his father and his exotic-looking nurse, but Blaine knew better; his father tried to conceal every non-white part of himself with a ferocity generally reserved for beloved hobbies or a cut-throat career path or the welfare of one's family. There wasn't any universe in which his father would have willingly become involved with someone he thought might undermine the illusion he'd worked hard to create.  
  
It would have caused too much of a scandal. His mother's outburst had caused more than enough for a lifetime of Andersons.  
  
He wondered occasionally, with a kind of idle curiosity, where in the world his last name had come from because he had met a few of his father's side of the family when he was young and they didn't look like the sort of people to have such a...well, such an upper-crust and exceedingly white surname. He had long suspected his father opened a phone book to the first page and picked the name with the most number of entries. Common, but still the first listing in the yellow pages for his practice. After all, his father was still a businessman even if that wasn't his primary profession.  
  
His father breezed in at precisely 7:10, his tardiness going unnoticed as it always did; had Blaine been so much as two minutes late, there would have been hell to pay - assuming his mother could still read that exquisite Tiffanys watch dangling from her slim wrist, that was, he thought sarcastically. He wasn't sure what it was about being around his parents that brought out the surly teenager in him, but like clockwork there it was by the time the first dinner at home started.   
  
The maid - whose name Blaine didn't know only because she had been hired two days after he left for Dalton - whisked in to place the salads in front of the three diners. Her footsteps were quick and silent, a winning combination in that house. She was gone almost as quickly as she had arrived, and his mother began to delicately pick at her food with the kind of careful determination she could devote only to completely meaningless things like selecting a centerpiece or spearing a precise leaf of lettuce.  
  
"Blaine." His father's voice broke the silence abruptly, and Blaine tried not to jerk towards the sound; he knew better. Still, it was the first anyone except Edgar had bothered to acknowledge his presence, and he wondered if maybe- "Posture."  
  
Blaine sighed and straightened a little in the chair. He was out of practice; during the summer the finer points of his parents' social graces became second nature again, and he was always amazed how quickly they disappeared once he was at school. He'd been gone barely a month and was getting critiques already - he didn't want to think about what would happen by the time he came back for Thanksgiving, in all its fifteen-course glory with a half-dozen of his father's colleagues and their wives, all of whom his mother saw socially on a regular basis. They would have to bring out the table leaf for that to fit sixteen instead of ten, leaving his parents even further away with no reason whatsoever to speak to one another; Blaine wondered if that was their favourite part of the day, the real reason to be thankful.  
  
No, he concluded with a faint smile to himself. That would imply they were hostile towards one another. They couldn't be; that would require them having emotional attachment.  
  
"How is school this year, darling?" His mother's voice was smooth, with just enough emotion and feigned interest to be socially appropriate.  
  
He thought for a moment, knowing he needed to be careful of his language and speech here in a way he didn't at school. It was like remembering a separate dialect, or that "soda" when they went to the family compound in Maine during the summers meant something entirely different - a horrible bitter concoction that was nothing like the Coca Cola he'd been requesting. While he was considered to be one of the more adult-sounding students at Dalton, a fact that curried plenty of favour among the teachers, at home he sounded immature by comparison - a fact his father had been trying to change since he was about eight. "I'm enjoying it," he stated smoothly with exactly the right practiced level of confidence and comfort. "My biology professor is excellent, and I find myself doing better than expected."  
  
His mother gave a vaguely happy-sounding "mmm?" as she sipped her drink, which was as high of praise as he was likely to get from her; he had a feeling it would still be the highlight of the evening.  
  
"Your marks so far?"  
  
Blaine had often wondered how his father, who made a living off listening to other people's problems and telling them how to fix them, could do so well for himself when the only times Blaine heard him speak he sounded so inherently, intrinsically annoyed. Displeased.  _Bored_  - as though he knew the answer already and he resented the subtle social pressure to ask the question at all. As though he wanted nothing more than to eat dinner in complete silence without intrusion from the inconvenience of his son being home from school and therefore expecting an intrusive conversation.  
  
Blaine had stopped expecting conversation of any kind before his twelfth birthday; he doubted he would ever stop wanting it.  
  
"All A's," he reported evenly without pride. If he sounded proud, it would appear that he was cocky - that he thought all A's were gratuitous and he could have been happy with a few B's. That simply would not do. All A's were exactly what were expected of him and what he would unfailingly deliver.  
  
Sure enough, his father's reaction was a simple nod, as though that was exactly what he expected to hear. He wondered if it was the same nod that schizophrenics got when revealing the deeply complicated worlds building themselves inside their heads - the slow, simple nod that was carefully practiced to seem without judgment but was more loaded than any word could ever be.   
  
"And your applications?"  
  
"Not yet, sir," Blaine replied. College applications had been the topic of each and every one of the four conversations he and his father had had over the summer - and those four conversations were practically a record for them.  
  
His father's brow furrowed and Blaine was struck by the realization that his eyes narrowed a little when he did that almost-glare thing. He wondered if they narrowed when his father smiled, too - he'd never seen that, not that he could remember at least. Maybe that was why he was determined to seem neutral all the time, completely without any semblance of human emotions in the presence of others; maybe it all came back to trying to appear as non-Asian as humanly possible.  
  
It seemed ridiculous, he knew that, but considering the earliest lecture he could remember involved his father telling him that the only way to get ahead in life was to blend in with the crowd...he'd been six, maybe seven, and excited about getting a solo in the all-school Christmas pageant. It wasn't even like he'd gone and tried out for that one, the teacher picked him because he was the best student and the only boy who never gave her any trouble, but for some reason the mere act of being alone in the center of the stage like that, singing without anyone around to cover his mistakes if he made them...to his father, that was threatening. Made everyone vulnerable. Made him  _uncomfortable_.  
  
Made Blaine want to sing every solo he could get his hands on because he was six or seven and hated being told no so often.  
  
So apparently being around his parents had made him surly long before he became a teenager.  
  
"Those need to be in soon. Your legacies won't get you everything, you know."  
  
No, Blaine thought, but the donations to whichever of the two Ivy League schools he selected certainly would. Yale and Princeton both - whichever he selected, even if he didn't have stellar grades and a host of well-regarded extracurriculars, his father's last name and the generous grant to whatever department the school wanted would ensure his acceptance.   
  
He hated it. He hated the whole idea of it. The fact that, right now, Sam would be able to get into better schools than Kurt could because Sam's family had gone to good schools - even though Sam's grades were horrible and he would probably say something silly in the interview because he hadn't had the same kind of social graces drilled into him...not that Sam didn't deserve to go somewhere good, it wasn't that, and he knew as well as anyone how hard Sam worked to try and show people he wasn't dumb, it was just that...Kurt wanted it ten times more than any person he knew and would probably never get there because of the system. How was that fair? How was any of that something he could legitimately buy into?  
  
But he would, he knew that. He would apply to the two schools from which his father held degrees and probably get into both of them, then select the one he liked better and get whatever he wanted. If only he actually wanted any of it.  
  
He didn't dislike the schools themselves; Yale actually seemed pretty great, they had the most incredible a cappella groups in the country and a football team people actually went out to watch on the weekends...he would probably enjoy himself there. Especially if he made with Whiffenpoofs. It just pissed him off that this was why.  
  
"I know, sir," he replied simply, taking a few bites of his salad.  
  
"You should have gone on tours of them this weekend instead of coming here." And even though Blaine knew that what his father meant wasn't "We don't want to see you"...he also knew they didn't exactly revel in his visits.   
  
"Dalton's arranged a trip next month. I've signed up to go." The reply was clearly not satisfactory to his father, but the matter was considered dropped.  
  
Their salads were cleared in silence, and no one spoke during the soup course. When he was little, Blaine had wondered if it was all a secret trick to try to get him to slip up; if no one was speaking, it made it much easier to hear if a kid made the mistake of slurping his soup. He had come to realize that was simply too taxing for his family to try to sustain conversation during two courses in a row. The niceties of the salad course had to give way to the silence of soup if they wanted to have the emotional or mental capacity to engage in pleasant exchanges of anecdotes during the main course, only to retreat back into silence as they carefully picked at their pretentious desserts.   
  
He wondered if the fact that he could carry on a conversation for longer than five minutes at a stretch made him some kind of aberration. After all, everyone around him seemed to be like this, even during dinner parties where continuous quiet meaningless conversation was not just expected but required if one was polite...then he met a few of the Warblers. Jeff and Nick could fill an entire dinner just the two of them, cracking jokes and teasing each other.  
  
He missed them already. It had been four hours.  
  
He hadn't had cornish game hen in awhile, and while it was beautifully cooked, he kind of longed for the simplicity of a burger. It was ironic; at school, everyone talked about how formal he was, said if he were just a little more uptight and stopped dancing so much he would be Wes's doppleganger, but at home he felt so...sloppy. Unrefined for even  _wanting_  something simple instead of the complex, elegant dinner before him.   
  
He had been chastised frequently for wanting things he shouldn't. At a certain point he just stopped admitting he wanted them; it was easier for everyone that way.  
  
"So, dear," his mother said as she elegantly worked to deconstruct the bird on her plate. "How was work?"  
  
He was convinced his mother had a Rolodex of questions in her mind, go-to safe topics that she could pull at random for any situation. He would have thought it odd, but considering the friends of hers he'd met he didn't think he could even blame her probably-toxic combination of pharmaceuticals and alcohol. Next she would probably pull something about the weather, then possibly a question about the upcoming party season and someone's masked charity ball, all asked with the same affected smile and lack of investment. She didn't care what the answer was - she never did. None of them cared about the response; they cared that it was the right, proper question to ask in the first place and then everyone stopped listening.  
  
His father swallowed his mouthful of food, then responded, "Average. Though there is an interesting case that's just come in."  
  
Blaine froze.  
  
They had these code words, the three of them. "Colourful" meant something more than merely unconventional, but someone who defied social graces because they lacked the proper knowledge and background to adhere to the rules properly. "Business-oriented" meant someone who was indelibly dry and interested only in himself - without, as his parents did, pretending to be interested in the others. Everyone knew no one  _actually_  cared about what the others were doing, but they all made a show of acting like they did because that was just polite. "Modern" meant hideous when applied to furniture and inedible when applied to food, and "interesting case"-...  
  
...Interesting case almost always referred to homosexuals. Actually, scratch that - it  _always_  referred to them; the only case Blaine thought was a counterexample had turned out not to be, as the revelation of what the voices in the patient's head told him to do had an awful lot to do with preying on young boys for sexual gratification.  
  
His mother simply nodded with interest, eyes round as she sipped her water, as though she didn't know exactly where this was going. Of course she knew, they just weren't meant to acknowledge the code; they were supposed to pretend this wasn't all so damned formulaic. "Oh?"  
  
"Yes. And a particularly difficult one."  
  
_Difficult_. That meant he didn't want to change. That the homosexual didn't think he was sick, and there seemed to be nothing Blaine's father delighted in more than proving him wrong.  
  
Not that he wasn't wrong, Blaine knew - the poor man  _was_  sick, it was just the kind of... _pride_  his father's voice would take on when he talked about curing him-  
  
He knew he was being irrational, that he was taking it too personally because of his own fears. His father's job was to cure people who were sick, to alleviate their suffering and ameliorate their conditions to the point where they could function normally. Could be normal people who could blend in with the rest of the world around them. Of course his father was proud when he accomplished that, even if the methods were barbaric.  
  
Those had their own code words, too.   
  
"He's had a lengthy history, this patient, with a number of recurrences. And intense symptoms."   
  
That meant he'd tried fixing it before and it had failed. And 'intense symptoms'? That meant he'd done the worst thing he could possibly do: he'd had sex. With a man. And if the case was difficult, it meant he didn't have remorse for it.  
  
Blaine wondered if he would have remorse, if he screwed up like that. If he would regret it as much as he regretted feeling it in the first place, or if something... _happened_  after. If something happened and after going through with the acts he envisioned so much - it felt like all the time they were in his head, especially at a school where all he saw were boys and so many of them were physically attractive, fit, clean-cut in their uniforms...if after doing that, having the most intense of intense symptoms...if it made the person stop feeling bad for doing what he'd done. If it was like a psychotic episode, where sometimes the patient had struggled for years to overcome and ignore and vanquish their demons, but after a psychotic break they just-...it stopped seeming wrong. They were too far gone to know how horrible it was, the things they'd done.  
  
He wondered if that was why the recurrences.  
  
If he would have recurrences.  
  
Because he knew how easy it was to let himself slip a little, to start  _wanting_  what he knew he shouldn't want, how hard it was to clamp back down on it and shove it back and not think about it. And the more he tried to let himself have just a little taste- It made things worse.  
  
If he let himself do everything he wanted to do, everything in those incredibly hot,  _intense_  dreams that left his sheets sticky and his throat sore from the moaning he apparently did into his pillow in his sleep...he could only imagine how much the intense symptoms would recur. And that couldn't happen.  
  
He couldn't let it.  
  
A part of him felt like he needed to get help. He had always been praised by teachers for being the kind of kid who knew enough to go to an adult when there was a problem, and this...this was a  _big_  problem. He should be... _adult_  enough to tell someone and get help.  
  
But the only person he could tell would be his father, and he couldn't-...the amount of shame it would bring him, that his own son-  
  
There were a lot of people in psychiatry who believed it was the parents' fault, and while the theory of an overbearing mother was certainly inaccurate, the absent father bit...well, there might be some grounds for that. Or at least, his father might think there were grounds for that, and it wasn't entirely fair to him.  
  
Not that he particularly wanted to be involved in any of the "options," either. The "treatments." He knew what they entailed, and he wasn't so sure he wanted to leap into any of that.  
  
He could imagine the family dinner after that conversation, his mother and father talking in all the same euphemisms about him - about how he was an interesting case but fortunately hadn't been too severe in his manifestations - after all, he still liked football and could talk passably about cars if he had to - and wasn't at risk for many recurrences provided the treatment options worked. No emotion. No showing that he was any different than any random homosexual man his father encountered. They would barely stop eating their salads long enough to mention it at all, probably.  
  
But it would be there, hanging over them, like some giant guilt-tripping  _cloud_ , and suddenly he felt like he couldn't breathe. His hands quivered as he lifted his fork to his mouth to take a bite, to keep himself from admitting something or asking a question or doing anything except sitting straight up in his chair and eating politely.  
  
If he forced himself hard enough, he could feel normal.  
  
He'd done it before, and it wasn't such a bad thing. Just because he enjoyed standing out when he sang solos didn't mean he had a problem with the idea of fitting in - especially not this way. He could let his parents introduce him to a nice girl - a daughter of his father's business associates, most likely, maybe the daughter of a woman in one of his mother's social circles or a new initiate into the D.A.R. once he got to New England where it seemed like everyone he'd ever met was a member...a girl of good breeding and impeccable grace, who could entertain guests at a party with ease and juggle a half-dozen social responsibilities at a time while he was off doing some achingly boring job. Then he would come home and they would have silent dinners across a giant table and be shells of people the way all adults were.  
  
It was just that he couldn't go there yet without feeling like he was suffocating on his own lungs.  
  
He made it through dinner and excused himself shortly into dessert; no one noticed. By the time he reached his room, he was almost shaking with tension, with the intense need to just get  _out_. It wasn't normally this bad, he knew that. Usually he lasted at least a couple days before it felt like he was being strangled by his mother's gardenia perfume and his father's idle disapproval; six hours might be a new record.  
  
Approximately sixty-eight still to go.  
  
He let out an involuntary whimper at the thought, clamping his mouth shut before another sound could escape into the silence of the bedroom that never felt like it belonged to him.   
  
Maybe if he focused hard enough on things, he could feel like he was back in his  _home_ , at school, where he belonged, where he didn't feel like he might die from everything being so...so  _everything_. Pulling out his math book, a slip of paper fell from his bag.  
  
Kurt's phone number.  
  
It had been in there so long he'd forgotten about it - Kurt had given it to him back when he'd gotten the boy his off-campus pass that first weekend, just in case anything had gone wrong or someone needed to reach him.   
  
He wondered what Kurt was doing right now. If he felt as smothered by being home as he did. He knew going home for the first time in almost a month after getting used to Dalton had to be strange - he should call and check on him, see how he was holding up. Reentry problems were common among new Dalton students, especially among those whom hadn't been going to boarding schools their entire educational careers. He reached for the phone on the nightstand and dialed the number written on the slip.  
  
Kurt answered on the third ring. "Sorry, Mercedes, I'll be over in about twenty minutes." Kurt sounded...happy. Like he was smiling about something someone had just said. Blaine could hear voices in the background, including someone telling Finn what fate might befall him if he tried to take that last slice of pie. It sounded-  
  
...it sounded like chaos. Like lunch with two dozen boys who had been cooped up, only on a smaller scale. And nothing had ever sounded more beautiful.  
  
"Things ran long, you know how dinner goes," he added.  
  
"It's-" Blaine cleared his throat. "It's Blaine, actually. I'm sorry, I had your number from-"  
  
"Is everything okay?" Kurt sounded worried, and Blaine realized suddenly he wasn't exactly sure what to say now that he knew Kurt wasn't sitting around some silent house wishing he were back at school. Kurt was  _enjoying_  his weekend home, and he didn't-  
  
"Yeah," Blaine replied quickly. "Yeah, it's fine. Say, I was thinking. I mean, if your offer's still open. I could come out there tomorrow, see you and Sam - you could show me around. I'd love to see this crazy town of yours you're always talking about, meet the infamous Mercedes." It sounded ridiculous time, and Kurt's tone was...strange when he responded. A little breathy and rushed, but still happy, and Blaine had no idea what that meant.  
  
"That sounds great."  
  
It meant getting out of the house, that was all Blaine needed to know.  
  
The fact that it meant spending at least part of the weekend with Kurt was either an added bonus or the worst curse ever; he wasn't sure which one yet.


	9. Chapter 9

The downside to having a family with more people was that there was more potential for embarrassment.  
  
Not that Kurt was ashamed of his new family per se - though he did wish that the could understand some of the more basic social graces above their station, and he wasn't entirely sure why Finn seemed to think that wearing clothes he'd worn all day at the shop to dinner was perfectly appropriate. It was just that...well, the boy coming over was someone important. Someone important for him to survive at Dalton - the de facto leader of the Warblers, the guy who had all the sway on-campus and with the administration, the guy who had managed to get him a weekend pass during a period when they were meant to be impossible to get. The guy he needed to impress if he ever wanted a shot at solos.  
  
Or anything else.  
  
He'd never felt this nervous just making  _brunch_  before.   
  
He didn't understand the anxious flutter in his stomach as he set out four plates, then grabbed a fifth, hesitated, put it back in the cupboard. Blaine had said he'd be over around now-ish, maybe? No definite time, no concrete plans, and Kurt didn't want to be the needy one who asked for all the details because it didn't matter  _that_  much and they were both kind of used to Dalton where anything that wasn't strictly scheduled became kind of freeform. It wasn't as though he hadn't eaten every meal with Blaine for the past five weeks, minus the first weekend home and a couple days he'd spent dinner holed up in the library and that one time Blaine had overslept and missed breakfast. Would he be this nervous if  _Jeff_  was coming over? Or Sam, for that matter?  
  
No, because he wasn't in love with them.  
  
He shook his head and rolled his eyes, his neck tightening at the reminder. Okay, fine - even if he applied that word to what he felt for Blaine (and he did, he kind of had to, he guessed...and it made him feel a little giddy rush whenever he thought about it)...that didn't mean he should feel this- this-  _ridiculous_  and like he was going to either drop the silverware in his hand or burst into uncontrollable giggles at any moment at the prospect of Blaine coming over.  
  
Oh god. Blaine was coming over. To his house. To hang out with him and be led around town by him and spend all day  _with him_ , and he was going to have to not do anything to embarrass himself to the point where Blaine never wanted to talk to him again.  
  
That was going to be much harder than convincing Finn not to say anything dumb.  
  
"You're sure you don't want help, sweetie? It's your vacation, shouldn't you get a break?" Carole asked.  
  
Kurt shook his head slightly. "It's okay. One of the things I've missed at school is having a kitchen I'm allowed to use. I enjoy cooking."  
  
It was true, of course - he did like to cook, enjoyed starting with a tray of pieces and  _creating_  something from it, something tangible he could enjoy later. And being able to cook, to bake, to have free reign of a kitchen, was one of the things that made him feel homesick at Dalton; unsurprisingly, the all-boys' school lacked even a basic home economics course or any other opportunity to work with ingredients. But it wasn't at all the whole truth.  
  
Cooking gave him something to do, something he could do with his hands and his body. Something that could sufficiently distract him from the fact that the boy he had such strong feelings for was going to be here in some unspecified-but-small number of minutes.   
  
And he didn't trust Carole to make quiche yet.  
  
The merging of the Hummel and Hudson families had been quite a process in and of itself. All Kurt's doing, naturally, with plenty of willing cooperation from Carole and not-entirely-willing cooperation from his father-...well, that wasn't entirely true. His dad had obviously been interested in the  _relationship_ , otherwise they wouldn't have gotten married, but he hadn't been so interested in the courtship portion. And Carole...  
  
She wasn't used to being a particularly... _womanly_  woman, was the only way Kurt knew how to put it. It wasn't 'her fault, it wasn't anything wrong, it was just the nature of things. She'd had Finn when she was young but of an appropriate enough age, but when her husband died during the war and she was left with a son to raise by herself...it was okay during the war years, there were never men around and there were plenty of jobs for a woman who wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty, do her part. But then the war ended and most husbands came home and her's...didn't, and she didn't have the luxury of staying home to raise Finn. Not that she wouldn't have liked to, she'd said many times - a little defensively, depending on who was asking - but it just wasn't an option. She needed to work, to get out there, to try to scrimp together enough to make ends meet with a boy who grew out of clothes faster than she could buy them on his way to reaching his final height of six-foot-ridiculous.   
  
And now she was married...and Burt had made clear from the outset that, as a proper guy, as the kind of all-around  _good man_  that he was known for being...he wanted to take care of her. Of the whole family. After all, the shop did well enough to provide for all four of them, even with the added expense of Kurt's tuition. Why should Carole have to keep breaking her back working two jobs like she had been?  
  
The housewife role just didn't seem to suit her so well, Kurt had noticed. Unlike Mrs. Jones who took a kind of pleasure in cooking and watching kids play in the yard, Carole seemed a little...lost in it all. And the two of them were never quite-  
  
Kurt wasn't sure how to put it. She had never tried to take his mother's place, and enough time had passed that Kurt wouldn't have minded that part as much. In fact, he almost wished she were filling that void a little more. But it was almost as if he was too housewifey for Carole's taste, and every time he did something like cook dinner - because he enjoyed it and he wanted to - or clean up his room - because he liked things neat and he was used to Mrs. Jones' strict thoughts on the subject...there was an awkwardness there, as if she thought she should probably be doing it but didn't especially want to and didn't know how to tell Kurt to stop being the de facto woman of the house now that she was around. Especially, it seemed, now that Kurt wasn't around much and she was having more of a chance to settle in to taking care of things around the house.  
  
But Kurt knew how to make the favourite dishes the way Mrs. Jones did; she'd taught him from the time he was probably about 12 because he asked so many questions that it was easier to show him. And he was used to keeping things neat anyway because he liked them that way. And it wasn't a matter of trying to usurp anything, it was just...  
  
Anyway. Which brought them to the quiche, which he was reasonably certain his father wouldn't eat and Finn would devour because it was even remotely edible and Carole had probably never made before, and Blaine...  
  
He had no idea, but that didn't matter. After all, he wasn't even sure when Blaine might arrive, and he might not even get here until after brunch. So he wasn't worrying about whether or not Blaine ate quiche.  
  
And he most definitely had not left out the scallions because he'd seen Blaine picking them out of dinner one night. Absolutely not. That would be ridiculous, and he was not a ridiculous person, he was a logical, educated boy who definitely did not go out of his way to impress people he liked. Or to spend more time with them.  
  
Which was why he had basically invited Blaine over before the weekend ever started.  
  
Which was why he had pushed the relationship with his dad and Carole in the first place, for that matter.   
  
At the nauseating realization, he set the silverware down on the counter with a rough clanking noise. Was that what he had been doing with Finn? Trying to get-...to get close to him like that? Because the feeling with Blaine was familiar but so much stronger and he wasn't sure if it had been the same kind of-  
  
It hadn't been  _intentional_ , he knew that much. He...he wasn't trying to get Finn into his bedroom to do the kinds of things that had started to fill his dreams, with naked male bodies pressed against each other and- and kissing and touching and  _groping_  in obscene ways that felt so disgusting and yet so incredibly needy in an amazing way. No. He hadn't been trying to do that to Finn. It was just that he liked Finn, he wanted to spend more time with him, he liked feeling the way he did when he was  _around_  Finn.  
  
Before he'd realized that Finn wasn't all he was cracked up to be and didn't keep his things neat and wore the same shirt three days in a row and could barely string a sentence together sometimes.  
  
Blaine, on the other hand...Blaine's room was certainly neat enough and he could more than string a sentence together.  
  
The fluttery feeling in his stomach was back as he checked the clock - another ten minutes before the quiche needed to come out. He needed something to do, but he was starting to genuinely worry about whether or not he could chop fresh fruit as nervous as he was - his luck he'd lose a thumb or something, and there was no way that Blaine would find that particularly attractive, and he needed to at the very least keep all his fingers so that he could snap in time with the other Warblers for the number at Sectionals coming up. The Council hadn't picked a song yet, but it was sure to involve snapping of some kind and-  
  
The doorbell rang, and while that should have sent him into an even faster tailspin, instead there was almost a sense of relief. Resignation. This was it, now or never. He walked to the front door and opened it to reveal Blaine.  
  
It almost took Kurt a moment to recognize him out of uniform, and it occurred to him that he hadn't actually ever  _seen_  Blaine in anything else, except the one night he'd seen the boy on his way out for a date in a suit. This was...different. Still very neat, very preppy - not like Finn at all. Finn didn't wear cardigans, for one thing, and certainly didn't set foot near a pink shirt like the one Blaine was wearing. With cuffed trousers that should have never worked on him and should have just made him look shorter but somehow worked.  
  
He felt dizzy suddenly and wondered if it was a side effect of forgetting to breathe for too long. He reached one hand to grip the doorframe to ensure that he didn't fall over, just...staring. Taking stock.  
  
He approved. And approval from him of fashion was hard to come by.  
  
Even if the shirt was plaid in a scale that should not have existed, and he would have selected a different shade of brown trouser to go with this particular combination of pink and light blue, but overall, he couldn't complain.  
  
He could see Blaine staring at him, too, but he was used to that. With his suede loafers he'd missed so much, and his two-tone collared vest, and the tied bow around his neck...he knew it was hardly typical weekend loungewear, even if one knew he had company coming over. "Why, Blaine, how surprising to see you," he said with a nervous flourish, cursing himself for the overly melodramatic tone it took on.  
  
But Blaine got it and smiled -  _smiled_ , looking so-...Kurt felt like he couldn't breathe again. "I hope I'm not too early. I was up and thought..."  
  
"Not a problem," Kurt assured him as he ushered the boy inside. "I was just putting the finishing touches on brunch, and I made enough in case."  
  
"You're sure?" Blaine asked.  
  
"Very," Kurt replied as he led the way into the kitchen.   
  
The first thing Blaine noticed was that the house was noisy.  
  
Not in a bad way, not like a kindergarten classroom kind of noisy, more like...like the people actually had something to say to one another. The television was on in the living room, and there was a joking disagreement about what to watch before the football game started, and there was the smell of food permeating the room - it never smelled like food at Blaine's house. Food just kind of  _appeared_  and it wasn't until the plate was in front of you that you even noticed it had a smell. The kitchen was sequestered into an odd part of the house, almost as if his parents didn't want to be bothered by remembering their human needs except when sitting down to actually consume food thrice daily. Here was the smell of something baking and fresh flowers and laundry soap.  
  
It smelled homey. It  _was_  homey. It was  _lived-in_ , with a few books out of place and a cabinet door still hanging open from where someone had started to retrieve something and forgotten to shut it. It was imperfect and real and so...  
  
Amazing. Warm. Lovely.  
  
"What is that? It smells great," Blaine offered.  
  
Kurt smiled, this odd combination of proud and shy, and replied, "I made quiche. I've missed cooking at school, and - like you - I was awake early and thought, why not."  
  
If Blaine didn't want to leave before...when Kurt smiled like that? He never wanted to go.  
  
Which was exactly why he wanted to bolt.  
  
* * * * *  
  
It was strange showing Blaine around all of his old haunts, Kurt decided, but strange in a way that left him almost giddy in its surreality. By the time Mercedes joined them for an afternoon of shopping, everything about the day had taken on an almost dizzy quality - the same way it had at the house, only he was making sure he actually kept breathing now so he knew that wasn't the problem.   
  
He found himself staring quite a bit, just  _watching_  Blaine - the way he moved in clothes that weren't his uniform. The way he mouthed the words to every song that came on as they sifted through racks of shirts at Montgomery Ward (and was Kurt seriously setting foot in there? More like, was Blaine seriously considering clothes from there? But he did have to admit that shade of red would look really great on the guy). The way he leapt onto every curb to walk along it like a balance beam, then gave a sheepish little grin when Kurt saw he was watching him, as if he wanted to apologize for doing something that wasn't exactly proper but he hadn't been able to help himself.  
  
That was the look that really got Kurt's head spinning.   
  
They chattered all day, it felt like - talking about music and musicals and movies...never silent, never even a real lull except when Blaine would try to make it a point to include Mercedes and she'd just give them both a 'get me out of here' look, which Kurt thought was really strange considering how great Blaine was. And how long it had been since he was home - he and Mercedes had so much to catch up on.  
  
Like how great Blaine was.  
  
They met up with the old McKinley glee club gang around 7 downtown, and it felt... _odd_. Like he'd been gone a thousand years, even though he had seen most of them only a month earlier. Like he was a different person than he'd been the last time he'd seen any of them.  
  
In a way he was, he mused as he watched Brittany and Sandy adjust their ponytails and Finn and Puck talk about some football game they'd watched that afternoon. He couldn't remember ever smiling this much when he had lived here, when he had seen them regularly. Now he listened to Blaine adding comments about some game that was on last week, and he felt like he couldn't keep the grin off his face. It was ridiculous, he didn't know why, he just-...he couldn't help himself.  
  
Until he saw Rachel walking over and the hideous skirt she was wearing. Then he could stop smiling.  
  
No, really. Who combined those colours into a plaid? And her sweater? Had a dog on it. She was a 17-year-old wearing a dog on her sweater and didn't see anything wrong with that.  
  
Oh, he had missed the epic comedy that was her wardrobe.  
  
"C'mon, guys," Finn said, digging his hands into the pockets of his jacket - it wasn't so cold for Ohio in October, but the wind had picked up after the sun went down and was not exactly a temperature conducive to standing outside for awhile for no particular reason - especially for the girls in their skirts, they had to be cold right? "Let's go." He started down the block, and Kurt froze.  
  
There were exactly two restaurants where teenagers in town could hang out: the diner, and Breadstix. Breadstix was less cool and a little more aimed at the adult set, but they didn't complain about groups of students sitting around for hours as long as they kept ordering Cokes, left a decent tip, and didn't make out with the waitresses on their breaks (Puck was to thank for that particular edict). The diner - which had a name but no one ever remembered what it was because everyone just called it "the diner" since there weren't two to confuse or anything - was the go-to choice for McKinley students, especially on a Saturday night.  
  
They also had a track record of not exactly obeying Ohio's newly-passed Civil Rights Act. That pesky law that said that you couldn't ban non-white patrons didn't seem to sway the proprietors of the diner, and certainly didn't sway the customers. Kurt hadn't set foot inside since the time he and Mercedes got chased out in a flurry of slurs (aimed almost more at him than at her, which had been a first) back in March.  
  
Three guesses which one Finn was walking towards.  
  
Kurt had often wondered just how blind Finn was. Yes, his big stepbrother was kind of dumb, but usually it was in an endearing way. How could he honestly not see anything around him? It required a degree of self-involvement that Kurt couldn't even fathom, and he'd been accused of being self-involved on more than a few occasions just because he happened to care about his clothes and his appearance and obsess a little bit about his skin. But it felt like everywhere he went, he saw things that were so ridiculously, unspeakably unfair, and Finn - who lived in the same house, in the same town, with all the same acquaintances prior to this fall - didn't see any of it.  
  
It made him want to scream.  
  
"Where're you going?" Puck asked.  
  
"Oh - I thought the diner, 'cause it's not too late so we can still get a table-"  
  
Puck shook his head. "Breadstix, man, c'mon."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because if my girl doesn't get her breadsticks, ain't nobody happy," Puck stated.  
  
"They literally aren't allowed to stop giving them to you. You could eat the entire meal just of breadsticks. And with the sauce? Yeah. We're going." Sandy linked arms with Puck and steered the group up the block in the opposite direction, towards the aforementioned purveyor of neverending overbaked stale bread, and Puck caught Kurt's eye in a sideways glance.  
  
He wondered if Puck saw what Finn didn't. If anywhere that wouldn't let Mercedes in didn't treat Santana too great, either. For that matter, he'd heard people whispering about where Puck's family might be from, and maybe-...either way, he never expected to see the day when  _Puck_  would be agreeing with him on where they should go.  
  
It wasn't as though he and Puck had ever liked each other. The guy had tortured him from pretty much his earliest school memory, then sometime around the week Puck had joined glee club it...stopped. Inexplicably. But that didn't mean they actually liked each other, even if Puck was basically Finn's brother from the time they were maybe five years old, and he and Finn were  _actual_  brothers now.  
  
But if it meant not having to call Finn out in the middle of Lima's main street and remind Mercedes of the entire incident that she had probably forgotten because that's what happened when you had comments flung at you every single day...if it meant not having to explain to Sam exactly why they couldn't go to the diner because such a thing would never in a million years occur to anyone at Dalton - or having to explain to Brittany that 'racist' had nothing to do with either running really fast or cleaning the things that were used to wipe off blackboards...  
  
He might begrudgingly thank Puck later. Probably not, because that wasn't what they did, but he'd think it in Puck's direction and that was good enough for him.  
  
Breadstix was comparatively empty for a Saturday and they were shown immediately to the big round table in the front window. Despite Kurt's best efforts to the contrary, the table quickly broke into two sub-conversations - Brittany, Sandy, Puck, and Finn talking about the deliciousness of the breadsticks and what they wanted to order and whether this place Puck knew a few towns over had better ravioli, and Rachel and Blaine talking about whether West Side Story signified a radical shift in musical theater styles. Well, that was what Blaine was talking about - Rachel seemed like she was just trying to tell Blaine how great she would sound as Maria and grill him about his range to determine whether he would be perfect as Tony (he would be, Kurt knew, but that wasn't the point).  
  
"I love the traditional musical as much as anyone," Blaine stated, "but I think the way Leonard Bernstein used the orchestration to help tell the story just as much as the words was really groundbreaking. I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the next few years."  
  
"But singing is what  _makes_  the musical," Rachel stated firmly. "Otherwise it would be ballet, and while I've taken ballet since I was four and am incredibly talented, I still believe that the best vehicle to telling a story through song is the  _song_."  
  
"Songs aren't just about the lyrics." Blaine shook his head. "The emotion, the  _movement_  - the dancing's incredible."  
  
"How do you know?"  
  
"I saw it on tour in Chicago, it was- you have to see it. Seeing it will change your mind, I'd bet you," he stated. "Besides, as much as I love a good old-fashioned love story set to music, I think West Side Story is more timeless. I mean, it's Romeo and Juliet for a new generation. The Music Man is so...dated. Traveling salesmen skipping town, and a woman being inherently untrustworthy because she's not married?"  
  
Rachel pursed her lips, stared him down a moment, and allowed, "Okay, fine. As the proud daughter of a strong single mother who has no interest in dating anyone because she is devoted to her career, I don't love that the entire town thinks there's inherently something wrong with Marian. But the scene on the footbridge..."  
  
"Is great, but isn't something we haven't seen before," Blaine pointed out.   
  
"But still incredibly romantic," Kurt stated without realizing he'd spoken. He guessed that was why the happy little sigh escaped, too.   
  
He didn't mean to. It was just that-...well, there was something so moving about that scene. Sneaking off to hidden places to confront one another, reveal that she knew he wasn't who he said he was but still he brought such a change into her life that she couldn't help but love him...he knew how she felt, too. Like suddenly the world that had been dull exploded with life around him because he met  _one_  person. Going from silence to being surrounded by music.  
  
From black and white to vibrant, rich rainbows of colour.  
  
He glanced nervously at Blaine, then reached over to take a breadstick to give himself something to do with his hands and eyes to avoid staring any more. Someone was bound to notice at some point, he knew, and that...that wouldn't be good. He didn't know what would happen, but he knew it wouldn't be good.  
  
The moment passed as Blaine and Rachel moved on to discussing relative-newcomer Julie Andrews and how fantastic she had been in My Fair Lady, and Kurt busied himself staring at the table and chewing on his stale bread.  
  
A group of six or seven Asian kids came in - around their age, joking and laughing as they were escorted to the other group table. Mostly Kurt noticed one of the girls was wearing a fantastic neo-Edwardian jacket. He wanted to stop her and ask where she had gotten it; finding that style had proved impossible in Lima - or in Columbus, for that matter - and he was left with one obscure mail-order catalog out of London via somewhere in New Jersey. They definitely didn't have the jacket she was wearing (a black velvet frock coat with an incredible black silk taffeta collar that seemed halfway between a stood-up shawl collar and a tapered mandarin), and wherever this jacket came from, he wanted to see what other jackets there were to be found there.  
  
Just because he didn't have the opportunity to wear things like that often didn't mean he didn't need any more of them. There was always the opportunity for fashion.  
  
"Looks like this is the place to be," Sam commented.  
  
"They come in here a lot after rehearsal," Rachel stated.  
  
"It's 8:30 on a Saturday," Sam chuckled.  
  
Rachel nodded seriously. "Evening rehearsal ends at 8. My mom tried to move it back to 10 on weeknights and midnight on Saturday, but their parents complained about making sure they got time for homework, so she added a morning rehearsal to make up the difference."  
  
Rachel's mother, Kurt guessed, was where she had inherited her intensity from. He'd never met her, but considering how often Rachel brought her up during the course of any conversation, he knew a little  _about_  her. She coached the glee club at the Asian school in town; he had often wondered why she didn't even try to get a job somewhere she could coach Rachel since - judging by the stories he'd heard - she was a completely insane stage mother. A modern Mama Rose with a decidedly more willing act to manage and far less nudity. But apparently McKinley was sexist as well as being racist, and the Asian parents were more willing to let her be intense in her coaching. No way would the parents at McKinley have stood for the idea of six hours of practice every day for a single extracurricular; even football didn't practice that long. The parents of Asian students, however... Intensity and single-minded devotion to an artistic pursuit in search of technical perfection was apparently a common ethos, and it seemed to jibe well with whatever it was Rachel's mother did to torture those kids.  
  
"They're excellent," Rachel added. "Because they spend so much time, their dancing is mind-blowing and their vocals are perfect. And with my mom's arrangements...While I don't know who they're competing against at Sectionals-"  
  
"Against us, I think," Blaine stated. "Lima Independent High School?" When Rachel nodded in confirmation, he replied, "Yeah. It's us, them, and Crawford Country Day. The letter came this week."  
  
Rachel's eyes lit up. "Well, then as much as I wish you luck, I have to say that I think there's no way they won't win the competition. They're extraordinary."  
  
If Kurt were being honest, he was kind of surprised Rachel hadn't found a way to convince the administrators at the newly-coined Lima Independent High School to admit her on the basis of some fictional relatives from somewhere in the general vicinity of Asia. It was the kind of thing she would do, and Kurt knew she had to be losing her mind without any creative outlet. She was so completely obsessive when it came to performance, a few thousand times worse than he was and he was pretty bad sometimes. But she had all the community groups, he supposed, the local musical theater group, there were choirs...somewhere, Dayton maybe? He remembered her mentioning them sometime. What could she do, anyway? Not like she could convince the school she was Asian just by saying so, and even if no one knew what happened to her dad there were enough people in town who remembered seeing him around that there were a few hundred witnesses who would attest to her  _not_  meeting the lone entry criteria.  
  
"What I don't get is why they still get a school," Mercedes stated. "I mean, your school gets closed, my school gets closed, but they still get to be every other year?" It was a perfectly fair question, Kurt thought. While the local Asian community wasn't too bad off - you know, if a person ignored the whole 'you're considered half as good as us but still better than  _them_ ' attitude and their questionable legal status under any given statute - but Kurt hadn't thought they had enough resources to just start a school like that. Create one out of nowhere, charter it as a private academy subject to fewer state restrictions, and just have a school all of a sudden.  
  
Well, not all of a sudden, he supposed. After all, they'd  _had_  a school before the entire mess with integration started; they'd had their own school for as long as Kurt could remember, and probably before the war too. But after the debate all summer about whether or not they should have been subject to a separate school in the first place, whether they should have been allowed at McKinley all along, he was under the impression that they wanted to just go blend in with the white part of town and ignore everything else.   
  
Apparently the idea of a year off school wasn't something they could accept. So they had gotten together and next thing Kurt knew, the Lima Independent High School just kind of... _appeared_ , operating out of the long-underused Community Center over in one of the more heavily-Asian neighbourhoods. So really the question was how they had the resources to afford an intense and slightly psychotic glee club director.  
  
"You're kidding, right?" Puck snorted. "This is like the best thing ever. No school? Nothing a person has to do all day?"  
  
"Speak for yourself," Mercedes replied. "My dad's sending me to the library every morning and won't let me come home until five because he's convinced I need to keep studying on my own if I'm going to go to college like my brother. Do you know how much easier it is to just go to school? Why can't I just go back to sitting in class, paying attention exactly half the time, getting my B+, and going home at 3?"  
  
"Sounds like my father during breaks," Blaine replied ruefully. Dalton, even as rigorous as it was, would still be preferable to his father directing his academic career.  
  
"Easy for you to say, white boy," Mercedes joked, and it took everything in Blaine not to react. Luckily he was extremely well-practiced - years of cold family dinners and even colder conversations had trained him well. "You don't have your father saying you have the responsibility of reflecting well on the entire race and changing every person's perception of black people everywhere. School's fine and everything, but why can't I like what I want? I'd rather sing than do anything else, but that's not respectable enough to make people think we're not all criminals or something. Like anyone dumb enough to believe that is gonna have their mind changed if I get a degree instead of moving to Detroit to be the finest singer since Billie Holiday."  
  
Blaine wanted to tell her she was wrong - he did have that. Only his position was far more precarious because his father sent the message with every step that he needed to be smarter, faster,  _better_  than any white person without ever revealing his reasons let he be uncovered as some kind of cultural double-agent. He had to single-handedly be the best part-Pinoy ever, the most successful, the best-qualified, without ever telling anyone.   
  
But he didn't want that kind of visibility. The kind of harassment she had to get- just for existing like that? The kind he'd seen a few of his cousins get? No. No way. That was what made things harder for Mercedes; not her father, but the fact that everyone else around her knew and she couldn't just...  
  
...Couldn't do what he was doing, which was sitting quietly without comment.  
  
That knowledge made his situation seem so much easier all of a sudden, even as much as he was dreading having to go home at some point in the next day, to deal with everything he couldn't stand about his family for another 24 hours.  
  
It was Sandy who responded. "Why do you have to make everything about race all the time?" she asked snottily. "I've met you, like, three times, and okay fine - so one of those times it was because I was trying to put spiders in your hair to see if they'd spin a web out of the plastic on your head-"   
  
"Oh you did  _not_  just say that-" Mercedes looked ready to lunge across the table.  
  
"-but every time I hear you talking, it's all about colored this, colored that. Whatever, okay? Nobody cares."  
  
"Oh please," Quinn said, rolling her eyes. "Come on,  _Santana_ , we all know what game you're trying to play here."  
  
"Nobody asked you," Santana replied dismissively, raising a well-manicured finger in Quinn's general direction.  
  
"You think because your dad does something-"  
  
"Um, excuse me? He's a doctor," Santana stated with a snooty tilt of the head.  
  
"What does that have to do with anything? My dad's a dentist," Mercedes interjected, irritated.  
  
"A  _real_  doctor - not a tooth doctor."  
  
"Can teeth wear stethoscopes?" Brittany asked idly, and Sam tore his eyes away from the three warring girls to stare at the vacant-eyed blonde beside him. "Because I saw it once, on a sign telling me to go to the dentist, and I think my teeth have eyes but I can't see them. But I don't think they have ears."  
  
"I..." Sam sent Blaine a 'help? What do I do now?' look, having no idea what the appropriate response was when a girl asked if her teeth had ears - okay, seriously? - but Blaine was busy watching the drama on the main stage, face an unreadable mask as he tried very hard not to react.  
  
Because what was he going to do? It wasn't even like any of it was  _blatant_ \- Well, it  _was_ , but not specifically against a particular group enough that he could jump in and point out all the ways it was wrong. It clearly was wrong, but it wasn't- Even if he wanted to speak up, what could he say? And if he did speak up, and every eye on the table suddenly went to him...then what?   
  
But mostly...how precisely was he meant to interject anything here? Even if he knew them - which he didn't - and even if he wanted to - which he didn't really...what exactly was the appropriate response when it wasn't outright 'You're less white than me but pretend you're not so I'm calling you out'? When it wasn't 'Black hair's ridiculous, white hair is better' but everything about the conversation  _screamed_  that?  
  
He had avoided these conversations in the past. Not been part of any real groups at his old school, walked away when comments were made. But now, stuck at the table with a bunch of people he didn't actually know - save Sam who just looked uncomfortable and Kurt who looked like he wanted to get on a magic carpet and fly immediately back to Dalton but had his hand on Mercedes' arm under the table - he realized just how long he'd been in a place that wasn't like this.  
  
He missed his bubble.  
  
He also missed precisely what it was that sent Mercedes storming off from the table, Kurt following her as she left the restaurant - head held high, looking like she was about to start yelling at people up one side and down the other but knew her mother would kill her for making such a scene.   
  
He leaned over to whisper to Sam, "Wait, what just happened?"  
  
"Sandy said-" Sam started to relay, but was interrupted.  
  
"You think being a jumping bean gets you to the top of the pyramid?" Quinn asked.  
  
"I don't know, is standing up there why your legs are so far apart?"  
  
Quinn's eyes widened, then her gaze hardened as she glared at Santana, eyes darting nervously to Finn, then Puck, then Finn again, then across the table- then she burst into tears. With as defiant a look as she could muster, she stood and stormed away from the table - definitely not fleeing. Not at all. Finn raced after her, catching up easily with his long strides. Outside the restaurant, she appeared to forget about the large storefront windows and flung herself suddenly into his arms as the rest of the table looked on.  
  
Sandy rolled her eyes and slipped out of the booth, dark ponytail bobbing as she stood. She 'smoothed' her skirt in such a way as to just accentuate her hips as she strode in the direction of the bathroom. Puck watched her go with moderate interest, but it was Brittany who followed her.  
  
"What was  _that_?" Sam asked, eyes wide. He glanced out the front window of the restaurant where he could see Quinn sobbing against Finn's chest while he held her and looked like he had no idea what was wrong or why his shirt was getting wet.  
  
"They do that," Puck shrugged.  
  
"Wait, really?" He glanced over at Blaine, as if to ask 'do girls really act like this and we've been missing it?'; Blaine just shrugged.  
  
"They can't have drag races, and they can't have fist fights, what else are they gonna do? Just 'cause they're chicks doesn't mean they don't have big man on campus and status and shit."  
  
"Okay," Kurt said breathlessly as he returned to the table. "Mercedes is okay but said if she came back in here she and Sandy would end up in a...let's just say physical altercation." He wasn't going to repeat in public what Mercedes had actually said. "So I'm going to walk her home-" wherein he would let her rant for exactly six blocks before distracting her by getting her into their go-to argument: the unacceptability of leopard print. They had it frequently, neither of them ever won (even though Kurt was most definitely right), but it was a safe enough way of diffusing anger into something that didn't matter to keep the two of them from nearly exploding with rage over something fundamentally important.   
  
He did that a lot, he realized. Distract himself to pour all his energy into something more superficial and pleasant than the horrible, mean-spirited, downright ignorant things people said. His mom had done it first - distracting him with picking flowers or restyling the curtains when he would come home crying because the boys were so mean to him in first grade. It kind of continued from there, he supposed; he'd spent an awful lot of time planning beautiful rooms with amazing furniture and daydreaming about elaborate weddings while trying to let the sting of the insults ebb away.  
  
He could only imagine how many homes' worth of well-coordinated rooms he would design if anyone ever found out about the whole new pool of insults available now with his...well. Condition, such as it was.  
  
It wouldn't matter when he was out of here, he reminded himself. He and Mercedes would get out of here, run away to New York - and she would be a famous singer with that gorgeous powerful voice of hers, and he would be a famous... _something_. Music was his first passion, but until or unless there were songs on Broadway suitable for his unique-yet-beautiful range, he might have to 'settle' for his secondary dream of running one of the big fashion houses.   
  
They could be safe there, and Mercedes could wear all the horrible leopard she wanted because they wouldn't need to fight about it as their go-to distraction (even though he would still be right about it being horrible). And their apartment would look amazing because he wanted it to, but he wouldn't need to plan remodels every few days the way he did now.   
  
_Two more years_  he reminded himself.  
  
"Blaine, you can walk along if you want, or hang out with Sam, or...I don't know, go grab milkshakes across the street-"  
  
"We can hang out around here," Blaine assured him. "Go worry about Mercedes."  
  
"Okay. I'll come find you, it shouldn't be too long - then we'll head back home. I have no idea what Finn's plans are, so he's not exactly a reliable fallback, though sometimes-." He stopped himself as he felt his planning start to go faster and faster, drew in a deep breath, and nodded. "I'll see you in a little while then," he added before exiting the restaurant.  
  
He missed Dalton.  
  
Two more years.  
  
He wondered if Man #16 had to redecorate his apartment as often as Kurt contemplated redoing his bedroom.  
  
* * * * *  
  
After watching Kurt and his family all morning, and Kurt and his friends all evening, Blaine had never felt more solitary.  
  
It wasn't that he didn't have friends at Dalton - he did. He had buddies, good guys he could hang out with and joke around with at lunch, boys he could study with and that he enjoyed going to town with to drink cheap milkshakes and monopolize the jukebox until other patrons wanted to strangle them all, but there was something-  
  
He wasn't sure how to explain it. That was part of the problem.  
  
Kurt had people he talked to. Actually, seriously,  _talked_  to. His best friend, that really intense Rachel girl who was kind of halfway not bad...he got the impression that, if something was really bothering Kurt, he could even talk to his father - he didn't even call the man 'sir', that had to mean there was a better relationship than any he'd seen, right?   
  
He couldn't imagine ever having a conversation with his father about anything important. Anything that was bothering him. Anything at all, really, except being chastised for not sending in his applications yet and not spending enough time networking and spending too much time singing.  
  
And talking - seriously talking? - with Jeff or Nick or Wes or anyone was just-...they didn't do that. None of them did. A few of them might break the mold a little and have deep conversations about being torn over colleges when letters started coming in later in the year, but that was it. That was the closest any of them would come.  
  
And normally he didn't care. Normally it didn't bother him, but everything inside him just kept building and he couldn't make any of it make  _sense_. He needed someone to help him put order to everything, but who the hell could he go to about things like this? About things like being different? About-  
  
About spending all night staring across the table at a  _boy_  and wanting to kiss him? Who in the world could he tell about that part?  
  
Because no one was safe unless they were like him, and he didn't know who that might be. Absent somehow sneaking one of his father's records, getting access to one of the patients, someone who could help him, who could help him not feel so goddamned  _separate_  all the time-  
  
He didn't want to be apart. He wanted to blend in, to just be like everyone else.  
  
No one was safe unless they were like him. But if he was so far out there, there wasn't anyone like him to look to.  
  
Except maybe-...and he couldn't be entirely sure, but he thought...maybe the boy whose fault this was.  
  
While he had only met a few of his father's patients, certainly not enough to be certain about the symptoms of homosexuality, from the few he had met...  
  
Kurt was one. Kurt was sick like he was, he would be willing to bet on it.  
  
He wondered if Kurt knew he was sick. If Kurt had guessed his secret. If Kurt knew about either of them, really.  
  
Lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, he whispered, "Kurt?" He wasn't sure if the guy was already asleep, it had been quiet in there for quite awhile.  
  
"Yeah?" Kurt whispered back. He was trying very hard not to think about the fact that Blaine was so close, just-  _right freaking there_ , and it was taking all his self control not to do something stupid.   
  
"Do you ever feel like..." Blaine hesitated, not sure what exactly to say now that they were here. There were so many things he couldn't put words to, so many feelings he couldn't quite-  
  
"Like what?" Kurt murmured. It felt like his heart was beating out of his chest, and he wondered if Blaine could hear it, could feel the way his breathing sped up at the unfinished question.  
  
"Like there's this...wall between you and everyone else because you're so...different?" Blaine swore he stopped breathing as he finished the question, shifting nervously on the bed.  
  
Kurt's heart sank. It wasn't about them. It wasn't about being like him, it was about  _not_  being like him. It was about dinner and not fitting in anywhere, about Santana being a bitch to Mercedes and Quinn being an even bigger bitch to Santana. It was about Blaine hiding his heritage, not hiding his... _feelings_.  
  
He felt like an idiot.  
  
Blaine didn't like him, he wasn't...he wasn't  _like_  him, he wasn't capable of-...they were friends and that was all.  
  
He wanted to cry.  
  
Instead he simply drew in a slow, deep breath; it echoed in the darkness, the quivering sound amplified a thousand times in his own mind. Blaine didn't comment - Kurt wasn't sure if that meant he didn't notice it. "Sometimes," he admitted quietly. "Especially here." Because it was true; at Dalton, things felt less black and white, less right and wrong, less like if he didn't want to date ever pretty girl he saw then he was disgusting. At Dalton, people could be people and have a variety of priorities and things in their lives without anyone making assumptions.  
  
Anyone except him, at least. He had assumed-  
  
"But not everywhere's like this, you know," he added quickly. "School's better, and - I'm told - there's a giant world out there with all different kinds of people. Places we can all...find our place to fit in."  
  
He hoped it was true. It was the only hope he had left - escaping Lima, escaping Ohio, escaping to somewhere lovely with other people, other homosexuals, other boys who wore fabulous clothes and liked musicals and liked  _boys_. There had to be a place out there like that for him, because otherwise...otherwise he didn't know what he was going to do, because he'd known what made him this way for less than a month and already felt like he was ready to crawl out of his own skin.  
  
"Besides. Santana's just... _Santana_ , and she and Quinn have been rivals for at least the last four years," Kurt added dismissively, trying to be reassuring by downplaying.  
  
Blaine swallowed hard. If Kurt thought he was talking about  _that_  - which he kind of was, but not really, not as the main thing, not as what mattered...then that meant Kurt didn't know what else there was to mean. He didn't know. He didn't get it. He wasn't-  
  
...He wasn't sick like Blaine.  
  
Oh god, even  _Kurt_  was normal. The boy who knew every reference that his father considered a hallmark of the homosexual, every album he hid from his parents...the boy who made Blaine feel less alone and more vile at the same time-  
  
_He_  got to be normal.  _Kurt_  got to have people to talk to, got to have understanding and community and- and not feel like  _this_.  
  
And Blaine was left alone in the dark, feeling separate from everyone else in the world.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi... I'm a friend posting this fic on behalf of fabfemmeboy (with his permission) and I'm relatively new to how AO3 works. If any of the links don't work, or if you notice other issues with the text or formatting, please mention it in the comments.

Le Chat Noir sat a few miles west of Route 75 on Highway 119, just past a little town called Anna that made Kurt shake his head every time he passed it.  Because really, who named a town that? And did the town being named that mean that more people named Anna lived there, or none did?  
  
There was very little to think about sometimes, living in Western Ohio.  
  
It was an odd establishment, part piano bar without the bar atmosphere, part homestyle restaurant with a side of jazz club and not particularly known for its menu.  Technically they weren't meant to be allowed in until they were 18, but Rachel's mom went there all the time and knew everyone, so the owner conveniently looked the other way on the half of them who were still 17.  
  
They'd been going for at least the past two years - not often, usually just right after competitions to let off steam.  Rachel had suggested it, pointing out that they never got to sing together anymore...and Kurt did miss that.  He missed getting up and singing with them in a way that wasn't precise and planned and technical, even as much as he enjoyed the challenge of singing with the Warblers.  And if he missed singing, and he  _had_  an outlet, he could only imagine how the rest of the group was feeling.  
  
He wondered if Rachel was staking out there every weekend to give herself performance opportunities.  It would absolutely not surprise him.  
  
"So your parents are actually letting you out of the house two nights in a row?" Blaine asked Sam as they walked across the parking lot.  "That has to be a first."  
  
"Yeah.  I can't tell if they're trying to make up for being jerks the last like decade, or if they think they're giving me enough rope to hang myself.  I guess I find out tomorrow."  
  
"What's tomorrow?" Kurt asked.  
  
"Didn't I tell you?  They're insisting on driving me back so we can talk about what's wrong with me.  I'm just hoping that means a side trip to Columbus to set up appointments or something and not them meeting with the Dean of Students to talk about my immediate withdrawal so they can stop paying to send me somewhere I'm never going to succeed."  
  
"So it's something they can fix?" Blaine asked.  
  
"Kurt thinks so."  
  
"Really?" Blaine looked amused at the thought, as though Kurt being the master of diagnoses was...adorable.  Endearing or something.  Sweet but misguided.  One of those anyway, Kurt wasn't 'sure which one.  
  
Kurt stood a little straighter and gave a short, defensive, "Yes," then softened a little and allowed, "Doctors have been doing tests and studies where they change the spacing between letters and words and things.  No one knows what causes it, but that's not really the important part.  Aside from the fact that it's not Sam's fault - which all of  _us_  knew, but in case his parents or teachers didn't - it doesn't matter why.  It's all about what to do now.  Coping mechanisms, study strategies.  Doing more things out loud or typing a separate copy that has more space between letters.  Or writing it in Elvish," he added with a fond smile.  He still didn't understand Sam's affinity for the fictional language, but it was easier for him to read than English so if that would help him, why not?  
  
"Aglar," Sam replied, and judging from the enthusiasm that meant something along the lines of 'cool.'  Kurt wasn't asking beyond that.  
  
"No one knows why?" Blaine asked.  
  
Kurt looked at him curiously, eyebrows knitted together.  "No," he repeated slowly.  "But that's not the important part.  Why does it matter why Sam sees things the way he does?  We know there's nothing he's doing wrong, there are other people out there like him, and he's not crazy or screwed up or  _wrong_  - it's a natural condition, and there are people out there who can help."  
  
"But if the entire point is to be able to fix him-  If we knew why, we could have known earlier," Blaine stated, frustrated.  "Because in the meantime, he's had to feel like- like it's his fault for not working hard enough, for not succeeding no matter what he did.  If we knew what caused it, it could be fixed in the first place and he wouldn't have spent the last four years feeling like everyone around him was doing something right and he just couldn't make himself do it no matter how hard he tried."  Because he knew that feeling - he knew it too freaking well.  He knew what it was like to lie there at night and wonder why everyone else around you could be normal and could do normal things like liking girls and no matter what you did or how hard you attempted-  
  
Even Kurt was normal.  Even Kurt could please his father - he'd spent all morning sitting at Hummel Tire and Lube watching the two of them work on cars together while Finn was at church with his mother, and the two of them looked so effortlessly happy together.  Even though Kurt was the most feminine man he'd ever met and should surely have been sick like he was -  _sicker_  than he was...even though he didn't play sports or spend time hanging out with the guys in town the way other Warblers did...Kurt could still stand there with his dad (whom he didn't even call 'sir'!) and build engines?  
  
Maybe he should try that.  Maybe he should try taking up better hobbies - not getting rid of music, of course, that was the only thing that kept him from going completely crazy and it wasn't a girls' extracurricular even at his old school.  There were plenty of manly singers out there, and when he was up on stage was the only time he felt  _human_ , like an actual person instead of like someone who was disturbed.  But running wasn't the most masculine of sports, he supposed, and there was none of the team-building the same way.  He should take up football...except he would be the smallest guy on the team by a good 50 pounds and the season was mostly over.  He liked to jump around, maybe he could stretch and learn to play kicker or something.  That was a good, solid, man's pasttime, right? Football?  He certainly enjoyed watching it, maybe if he played it he could-  
  
Or maybe Kurt could teach him about cars. After all, if hoisting tires onto a 58 Corvette could make Kurt normal, there had to be hope for him.  
  
Maybe that was the option he should be pursuing.  His father had mentioned doctors who were working on treating sexual perversions with behavior modification therapy - quacks, his father claimed, with a 25% failure rate.  His practice boasted a much higher success rate than 75%.  
  
But 75% was better than what he had now.  A lot better, actually.  
  
"Blaine?"  Kurt was looking at him curiously, and he realized he'd been quiet and tense for the past few minutes - and they were standing aimlessly in front of the door without entering the establishment.  "Are you okay?"  
  
He recovered quickly, pasting on a smile.  "Yeah," he replied easily.  "Of course.  I just know how hard Sam's been working and how much of a struggle it's been.  How painful."  
  
"Seriously, guys, I'm fine," Sam pointed out.  "But ask me again after being stuck with my parents in a car for over two hours," he joked and opened the door.  
  
The club was about half-full, which for a Sunday night wasn't bad; there were a few more people because it was a holiday weekend and a few more people than usual could come out to spend the night singing to a house band in honour of Christopher Columbus and his mandated day off.  Rachel had snagged a table for them already, near the stage and dead center, and Kurt was surprised to see the rest of the gang already there - Sandy on Puck's lap making out with him (not at all surprising), Finn and Quinn sitting side-by-side with hands intertwined.  And Brittany staring off into space, also no surprise there.  
  
"Looks like we're the last ones," Kurt offered.  
  
"Mercedes isn't coming?" Blaine asked.  
  
"Oh, no way," Kurt laughed, then saw the look on Blaine's face and quickly explained, "Because it's Sunday.  She's not allowed out anywhere except church, even in the evenings.  Family day is a big deal at the Joneses'.  No, she's been here before - quite a bit. Don't worry."  
  
Of all Blaine's worries for the evening, that wasn't close to being any of them.  
  
"So who's up first?" Rachel asked brightly when everyone had taken a seat and ordered the first round of beverages - alcoholic for Finn, Puck, Sandy, and Brittany, which Kurt guessed meant Quinn was driving.  
  
"You don't want one?" Finn asked, tilting his beer in Blaine's general direction.  "You're same age as us, right?"  
  
"There are very few ways to get kicked out of Dalton - drugs and excessive alcohol are at the top of the list," Blaine stated gravely.    
  
"Even if you're 18?" Puck asked, staring, as if that was the worst rule a school could possibly impose.  
  
"Yeah, they're serious about it," Sam replied.  "Warblers crack down even harder than the administration, too."  
  
"Yeah, make Wes tell you that story the next time you need a good laugh," Blaine instructed Kurt with a wicked grin.  "Never has a house party sounded so much like a full-scale invasion of Normandy."  
  
"Oh no," Kurt laughed.  
  
"You know how he gets, right?" Sam checked.  "With the stories and the history-"  
  
"I was there for the one about the French delegation.  And the off-campus performance-"  
  
"I can never keep a straight face for that one," Blaine stated, almost laughing even at the thought.  "The look he gets-"  
  
"And his tone," Sam added helpfully.  
  
"As though he personally witnessed the death of those guys.  And when he says-"  
  
Sam modulated his voice up a little and affected a mournful air as he imitated, "Welcome to Ohio, Lucky Lindy" and all three burst into laughter.  It was a horrible impression but that almost made it funnier because it was so ridiculous.  
  
The rest of them looked at the three Warblers like they were crazy.  "What the hell are you three laughing about?" Sandy asked.  "You're so loud you're distracting my man."  
  
"Sorry," Blaine replied, not actually apologetic.  "Wes is the head of our Council."  
  
"Council?" Finn asked, confused.  
  
"We don't have a director, it's all run by members of the group," Kurt explained.  
  
"So Wes is your guys' Rachel?" Puck surmised, ignoring Rachel's indignant huff.  Kurt only barely restrained his laughter at the image of the hellfire that would rain down on them if Rachel were ever given a gavel.  
  
"Can it, Puckerman," Rachel replied angrily.  
  
"So how's this work?" Blaine asked, looking at the stage where a girl was singing a not-so-great rendition of "Who's Sorry Now?" by Connie Francis that was whiney and tended to go oddly sharp.  It had been too long of a weekend already and wasn't over yet; between dealing with his family, meeting Kurt's entire family, all of Kurt's friends, and generally spending the previous two and a half days feeling like he was winding himself tighter and tighter in an effort not to appear at all unhinged, he needed to let loose tonight.  And if he couldn't drink (which he didn't think he wanted to anyway, since even though it looked like his mother was certainly not bothered by mundane things like human emotions, he didn't particularly want the zombie thing going either), then it meant there was absolutely no other choice but to turn to his preferred outlet:  Putting on a show.  Getting up there and singing and dancing and letting everything else just melt away until it was him and emotion and the music.  
  
"Just go up when people are done.  Sometimes there's a line or stuff, but you can see if anyone's waiting," Finn pointed off to the side of the stage.  "And there's not too many people - not like last time when it took like half an hour before even Rachel got to sing anything, and she's pretty pushy about it."  She shot him a glare and he added, "Y'know, in a good way or whatever."  
  
"Is there a list of what they know, or...?"  
  
"Oh, they know everything," Rachel stated.  "Just tell them when you get up there what song and if you prefer a particular key.  Sometimes you don't even have to tell them the song, just start the first few lines and they'll catch up."  
  
"Yeah, they're kinda amazing like that," Finn agreed.  "They even know that weird negro music Puck likes."  
  
"It's Chuck Berry," Puck replied, like Finn was an idiot to not recognize either the songs in question or that the guy was talented.  "Have you heard the guy play? He's fucking amazing.  But yeah, they know everything," he added in Blaine's direction.  "Even Rachel's Broadway crap."  
  
Sam knew the look on Blaine's face.  "Need backup?" he asked.    
  
"Not on this one," Blaine replied.  As the girl finally ended her song to meager applause, Blaine stood and strode to the front of the room, hopping up on stage before anyone else had even meandered in that direction.  After quietly giving his song choice to the bearded piano player who was dressed all in black, he stood centerstage and carefully unwound the microphone cord, trying to ensure he could move as much as possible without tripping himself (or the band) before placing it back on the stand.  He glanced over at the table and flashed a smile in Sam and Kurt's direction, then glanced over at the irritated-looking pianist and nodded.  The drummer counted out four, then the [song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bJI5QDfglk) started.  
  
_Well, it's Saturday night and I just got paid,  
Fool about my money, don't try to save,  
My heart says go go, have a time,  
Saturday night and I'm feelin' fine  
I'm gonna rock it up, I'm gonna rip it up,  
I'm gonna shake it up, gonna ball it up,  
I'm gonna rock it up, and ball tonight._  
  
By the time Blaine reached the first chorus, he was already starting to feel better.  The crowd was into it, and while he was used to that response - especially around school, where the Warblers really were kind of campus superstars - he wasn't used to it being just for him.  For his performance instead of for the institution of the Warblers and a hundred years of history as retold by a boy clutching a gavel.  He was used to it being applause and cheers for a team effort, for something practiced and voted on and planned.  
  
This was free.  This was spontaneous.  This was raw release of energy and emotion in a way he'd forgotten could feel this incredible.    
  
He could take liberties with a few notes if he wanted.  Who would care?  If he did a bit more of a slide on that note than he'd planned on, who would be hurt by it?  Not like singing in tight group harmonies, where one change could throw off the entire chord.  This was entirely selfish music - music for him and him alone and not worrying about who needed him to sing which notes and when and how.    
  
This was what he needed right now.  
  
Not all the time.  On Tuesday he would go back to his well-regimented songs, singing with the Warblers, and he would enjoy that fine; he enjoyed any time he got to sing, especially in front of people, but this...he needed more of this in his life.  
  
Less thinking.  More feeling.  More singing like Judy would sing - just pouring whatever was in his heart at that moment into the song.  And right at that moment, what needed poured out was frustration.  Defiance.    
  
He was going to freaking enjoy himself.  He was going to express himself and make a  _spectacle_  of himself and  _revel_  in how good it felt to stand out. What did his father know, anyway?  His father, who had never felt like this- Blaine could guarantee the man had never let go of himself for five seconds, for even close to long enough to get a taste of this feeling.  
  
_Got me a date and I won't be late,  
Picked her up in my 88  
Shag on down by the union hall,  
When the joint starts jumpin' I'll have a ball,  
I'm gonna rock it up, I'm gonna rip it up,  
I'm gonna shake it up, gonna ball it up,  
I'm gonna rock it up, and ball tonight._  
  
Kurt couldn't stop staring at Blaine.  
  
It was hard enough not to look at him during an ordinary conversation, but he had trained himself into having that kind of willpower.  He could look at Blaine only when it was appropriate in the grand scheme of who was speaking and what they were saying and whether Blaine's reaction should have been important to him (because it always was, whether it was meant to be or not).  
  
When Blaine sang, that was another matter entirely.  When he sang, he was captivating, and Kurt had been chastised on more than a few occasions by Wes or Thad for being too busy watching Blaine and forgetting his own choreography.  But he couldn't help himself - Blaine had stage presence in spades and an incredible light about him when he performed.  He could sing a lullaby and be entrancing, Kurt suspected, let alone when he sang something he enjoyed.  
  
But tonight...  
  
This was something even more intense than usual, and Kurt had no idea what it was but it was a whole other side of Blaine.  Unrestrained.  Untempered.  Excited, almost punchdrunk, and the grin on his face was so wide and bright...  
  
He couldn't look away.  Couldn't bring himself to see if anyone else was just as hypnotized by Blaine's performance, because that would require ripping his gaze away and he couldn't bring himself to do it.  He felt a kind of giddy smile crossing his features, the blush start in his cheeks and work its way down across his neck and chest, but he could blame that on it being hot in there if anyone asked.  
  
But honestly, if they were watching the same performance and could think to ask about Kurt's rosy cheeks, clearly they weren't actually paying attention.  Because anyone who was really  _seeing_  Blaine like this had to be watching just as intensely, he was sure of it.  
  
_'Long about ten I'll be flying high,  
Walk on out unto the sky,  
But I don't care if I spend my dough,  
'Cause tonight I'm gonna be one happy soul,  
I'm gonna rock it up, I'm gonna rip it up,  
I'm gonna shake it up, gonna ball it up,  
I'm gonna rock it up, and ball tonight._  
  
The instrumental break was a welcome change, allowed him to move around and get out more of the tension.  He was used to performing either in the Commons or occasionally outside on campus, or on the stage at competitions, never with microphones, never with cords he had to worry about, and while he had been able to dance a little bit during the verses, this was better.    
  
He hopped off the front of the stage, dancing his way across the front row of tables with a little half-skip-step , then jumped back up onto the edge of the platform rather than taking the stairs.  The "ooo!" he heard from a few patrons spurred him on - they liked this, they all did, they liked  _him_  and that was always an incredible feeling.  With a quick step onto the piano bench, he was up on top of the secondhand baby grand.  He felt like the king of the world...until the guy playing glared at him over his glasses.  Okay, fine, maybe he had gotten carried away a little bit, but he couldn't help himself. He hopped down swiftly, not even coming close to falling or toppling into any of the other musicians, then took a running start to slide on his knees across the stage, stopping in front of the mic and scrambling skillfully to his feet just in time to start the last verse.  
  
_Well, it's Saturday night and I just got paid,  
Fool about my money, don't try to save,  
My heart says go go, have a time,  
Saturday night and I'm feelin' fine  
I'm gonna rock it up, I'm gonna rip it up,  
I'm gonna shake it up, gonna ball it up,  
I'm gonna rock it up, and ball tonight!_  
  
The crowd applauded wildly and he heard more than a few boisterous shouts of encouragement from further back.  He gave a quick bow, then hopped off the front of the stage again to make his way back to the table.  His breathing was quick and shallow, his grin so broad it almost hurt, but he didn't care - he felt like he could do anything.  Like he could  _be_  anything and anyone and just-  Just be incredible out there.  Like he could quit school tomorrow and just do this for the rest of his life.  He didn't care that it was a ridiculous idea or that his father would hunt him down and kill hi (if only his father were capable of that strong of an emotion); he felt amazing.  He  _was_  amazing.  
  
He flopped down into the seat beside Kurt, who was grinning from ear to ear.  "Nice job," he said smoothly.  Kurt had this way of understating things that seemed really cute and sweet and like he was trying to avoid sounding too genuine even when he was actually impressed, and Blaine was starting to recognize it pretty well.  "I'd offer to buy you a Coke, but somehow I doubt you need any more caffeine," he added, teasing, and Blaine laughed softly.  
  
"You've gotta get up there and sing something - the crowd's great, it's fantastic."  
  
"In a few minutes, maybe," Kurt allowed, nodding towards the stage.  "Sam's going up now."  
  
"No kidding?"  Blaine glanced and saw for himself.  "Any idea what he's singing?"  
  
"None whatsoever," Kurt replied.  "You finished your song, I looked over, and he was making his way up there."  He didn't want to admit that Sam could have been up there for a solid two minutes before the song ended and he wouldn't have known.  For that matter, Sam could have told him what song he was going up to do and Kurt wouldn't have heard him.  He was too preoccupied watching the insane jumping boy  _on top of a piano_  and singing his heart out up there, turning a mediocre song in a style Kurt never particularly found endearing, into a performance Kurt would gladly watch every day for the rest of his life.    
  
"Huh."  Blaine nodded, still grinning as the rush of performing began to slowly ebb away.  As the [opening notes](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_3fGY_DMkc) began, he listened for a moment.  Realizing what song it was, he offered, "I wish we'd known - he's gonna need backup on the bridge."  When Kurt gave him a blank look, Blaine added, "On the 'da da ta da-dum' section in the middle?"  Kurt blinked, and Blaine smiled, nudging his shoulder.  "You'll see when he gets there."  
  
_Maybe baby, I'll have you  
Maybe baby, you'll be true  
Maybe baby, I'll have you for me  
It's funny honey, you don't care  
You never listen to my prayer  
Maybe baby, you will love me someday_  
  
It occurred to Kurt that he'd never actually heard Sam sing by himself before - only ever with the Warblers.  He knew they sang similar parts, usually Sam was one part down but occasionally they merged or intertwined depending on which one of them had a countermelody, but Sam never even got a chance to play the guitar in their room because he was usually so busy focusing on schoolwork.  Hopefully that could change now, Kurt thought, because Sam did have a really good voice.  Less twangy than Buddy Holly, but in a way that really worked for the song.  
  
He glanced over at Blaine to ask if Sam - or any other Warblers, for that matter - ever got solos, but Blaine looked worried.  The ecstatic grin was gone, replaced by something a little more grim.  "What's wrong?"  
  
"He's got it bad."  
  
Kurt's eyes narrowed in confusion.  "What do you mean?"  
  
"Look at the way he's staring at your stepbrother's girlfriend - he's got it  _bad_."    
  
"How can you tell?" Kurt asked.  Yes, Sam was looking intense, but Sam looked intense most of the time - usually intense over a book, sure, and trying to figure out what a question was asking, but this was hardly a strange-  
  
"See how he can't stop looking at her?"  And it was true; Sam hadn't taken his eyes off Quinn since he got up on stage.  Kurt glanced over to see if there might be anyone else Sam was looking at, but no - not unless he was looking at either Finn or Puck, and the look wasn't lecherous enough for him to be staring at Santana's ass.  He was definitely staring at Quinn.    
  
The good news was that Finn didn't seem to notice.  
  
"That means something?"  
  
Blaine looked over at Kurt like he was more than a little dense, and Kurt bristled.  "Yeah.  That's a surefire tell.  When a person can't take their eyes off someone, it means they like them.  Or there's something stuck in their teeth," he added jokingly at the end.  
  
Oh god.  
  
Kurt swallowed hard and tried not to let it show how much stiffer he was sitting in his chair.  If the inability to look away was an automatic, universal, obvious sign that a person was head over heels for someone, a sign that any fool could see-  
  
Then he had just announced himself and his natural-but-still-not-acceptable attraction in front of an entire bar, including every friend he had in this town, his roommate, and the object of his affection.  
  
An icy panic settled in his stomach, churning nervously.  Had anyone else noticed?  He had no idea - he hadn't been able to look away, for all he knew the entire table was staring at him staring at Blaine, watching him watch the beautiful boy onstage.  They could all know right now and he would have no idea.   _Blaine_  could know.  
  
...probably not, he reminded himself.  If they knew, they would be staring at him  _now_ , looking at him like he was a freak the way that they did when he wore something particularly theatrical or selected a song none of them (except Rachel) had heard of.  If Blaine knew, he would have said something or hightailed it across the building by now.  Decided to spring back to Westerville to get awawy from the unwanted affection.  
  
Or told him it was reciprocated, if Kurt's lingering suspicions about Blaine were correct.  
  
He just needed to not stare anymore, he concluded.  Better safe than sorry.  Just because no one had noticed this time didn't mean no one would notice next time.  There were already boys at school who had noticed how often he stared at Blaine, meaning the Warblers already knew or they didn't know the universal signal for attraction.  Knowing which boys had commented on his staring, he guessed they just didn't know what the sign meant.  But he had to be more careful - just until he knew if Blaine was in a position to reciprocate.  
  
He carefully trained his eyes on the stage, staring at Sam's shoes.  He didn't hate Sam's shoes, but he wasn't in love with them either.  It seemed safest.  
  
_Well you are the one that makes me glad  
Any other day that makes me sad  
When someday you want me  
Well, I'll be there, wait and see   
  
Maybe baby, I'll have you  
Maybe baby, you'll be true  
Maybe baby, I'll have you for me_  
  
It was in the middle of Sam's serenade of the blonde girl - who, Blaine had to admit, was incredibly attractive and would be the source of many a fight at Dalton if she were dating one of the guys there - that he realized the real problem with feeling invincible onstage:  
  
It made you do really stupid shit sometimes.  
  
Because here was the thing: he could tell that the girl (Quinn? Lynn? Cin? Something that rhymed with Finn, he remmebered that much because he had found it amusing the night before.  Quinn.  That was it.) was uncomfortable.  She was sitting stiffly in her chair, looking incredibly irritated by the song, gaze narrow as she practically shot lasers out of her eyes at the boy singing his heart out.  She moved the hand that was holding Finn's to her lap, squeezing Finn's hand tightly and raising her eyebrows as if to say "Taken? See?"  But Sam was undeterred and kept singing.  
  
The worst part was, it wasn't his fault he couldn't see it.  Blaine knew that.  He'd just been up there and knew how unstoppable he'd felt.  How confident and attractive and winsome he'd seen himself as in that moment as he was jumping on top of a piano.  (Oh god, had he really jumped on top of a piano? Who  _did_  that? That was a bit much even for him, and he'd been dancing around on top of coffee tables in the Commons for as long as he could remember!)  Sam was feeling the same thing up there, and that was why he was still serenading this girl who was sitting there with her damn boyfriend of at least three or four years.  
  
That was the problem with performing like this.  With spontaneity.  With feeling unhinged and free:  You did ridiculous, idiotic things like sing a love song to a girl you'd just met who had a longterm steady,  _in front of the steady_ , who was easily six inches taller than you.  You made public declarations that would put a drunk to shame.    
  
You did things like announce your psychosis in the middle of a crowded restaurant.  He hadn't done that tonight, but he could have - oh  _god_  he could have in that moment.  He could have jumped off that piano and off the stage and danced over to the table and told Kurt-  
  
told  _everyone-_  
  
No.  Oh no.  
  
And he wouldn't have realized it until practically now if he had, either.  He would have been so high on the feeling of being up there with everyone loving him and the feeling of complete and utter freedom that he would have announced his perversions to the entire room and not even paid enough attention to try to cover it until a good five minutes later.  
  
This was the problem with deviating from the script.  
  
Scripts were horribly constricting, but they were useful.  They prevented disasters like  _this_.  They kept order in a world that was otherwise nothing but chaos, and they made sure people behaved properly and did what they were supposed to - not like this.  The script would never have called for  _this_.  
  
And as horrible as feeling constricted was, the feeling bubbling in his chest like he couldn't quite breathe and was going to choke on his own lungs...it was surely better than the kind of mortification and humiliation that would ensue otherwise.  And while he had never had shock therapy, he was pretty sure that suppression of himself, even as horrible as that felt, was better than having electrodes strapped across his body.  
  
Because that was what happened to people who announced they were crazy in public, who had giddy, euphoric meltdowns in bars, wasn't it?  It was what his father would do, he knew that much, if his father got the phone call about a person he was responsible for.  
  
Order had to rule the day.  Otherwise things like that would happen, and he couldn't go there.  He wouldn't.  
  
_Well you are the one that makes me glad  
Any other day that makes me sad  
When someday you want me  
Well, I'll be there, wait and see   
  
Maybe baby, I'll have you  
Maybe baby, you'll be true  
Maybe baby, I'll have you for me  
Maybe baby, I'll have you for me._  
  
Sam finished his song with a flourish and a proud lopsided grin and made his way back to the table.  He tried to get a smile from Quinn, but she pointedly looked away as he approached.  Oh.  With a dejected look, he flopped down into his own chair.  Blaine reached over to rub his shoulder encouragingly and offer a "Sounded great," but they both knew it didn't help.  
  
Puck was smirking a little too much as he made his way to the stage, especially in Santana's direction, and Kurt knew this couldn't be good.  Surely enough, [it wasn't.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rws_7mLTqj8)  
  
_Got me the strangest woman  
Believe me, this chick's no cinch  
But I really get her goin'  
When I take out my big ten inch-_  
  
He paused for dramatic emphasis, grinning as he saw eyes widening (Kurt's and Sam's among them).  Surely he couldn't sing about  _that_ , could he?  Singing about getting a woman in the mood by taking out a large penis?  
  
...Did Kurt even want to think about whether the song was autobiographical? Probably not.  Though from the way Puck was smirking at Santana and she was grinning right back, he had a feeling it wasn't too far from the truth, and that was not a thought he ever particularly wanted.  
  
Maybe he wasn't actually attracted to men after all - if he was, he would be enjoying that thought, wouldn't he?    
  
_-record  
Of the band that plays the blues_  Puck concluded, low chuckles echoing from people who knew the joke already and a few louder laughs from people hearing it for the first time who appreciated gutter humour.  
  
"That was really cool," Finn stated, glancing down to the other end of the table where Sam was still looking disappointed.  "Him singing that song to Brittany and everything?"  
  
Quinn stared at him.  "Are you an idiot?" she snapped.  
  
"What?"  
  
"You-...you honestly don't-...oh-"  She stood and shook her head, storming out into the chilly October night.  
  
"Quinn!"  Finn raced after her, catching up quickly with his long legs.  "What?"  
  
"He wasn't singing to Brittany, you moron!  She's at the other end of the table and the only person in this group more oblivious than you!  He was singing it to  _me_!"  She huffed and started pacing, her arms crossed tightly beneath her chest; her jacket was inside, and it was cold out here, her breath making little puffs of steam in the light of the streetlamps.  
  
Finn blinked, not at all happy about that prospect, but stopped.  "Wait.  Shouldn't you be mad at  _him_ , then? What'd I do?"  
  
She spun to face him.  "You see a boy singing to me and you think he's singing to Brittany?  What are you going to do when our child is born, Finn, huh?  If he comes home with a black eye and tells you he walked into something, you'll probably think there's no way he could have gotten into a fight because he would tell you.  If he comes home drunk you'll believe when he tells you that he didn't know there was alcohol in his drink and he thought he was drinking lemonade.  If she comes home and tells you that no, she just ate a really big lunch today, she's not getting bigger because she's having a baby - you'll probably believe that, too, won't you?"  
  
"Quinn-"  He reached out to try to pull her into a hug - that had worked last night, it usually worked pretty well to just let her kinda cry things out and eventually she either stopped being mad or started making sense (usually the first one), but she pulled away.  
  
"No!"  She stepped back when he moved towards her, so there they stood several feet apart in a half-full parking lot.  "What are we going to do, Finn?  You and I, we can't raise this baby together.  We can't-"  
  
"We need to tell someone," Finn insisted quietly.  
  
"No," she stated firmly.  "We can't.  Because if my parents know, they-...we can't.  They can't know about this, no one can."  
  
"But aren't they gonna know sooner or later?  I mean, your stomach's gonna get all big and stuff, and there'll be doctors..."  
  
"Do you know what people are going to say about me?" she hissed.  She could hear it already - she was easy.  She was a harlot, a whore, a hypocrite.  The picture of a decidedly un-Christian woman.  She reached up to finger the cross necklace she had gotten from her father.  He would be so disappointed - she had always been his little girl, and now...now, just a few months before her Debutante Ball, when she was supposed to bring such honour to the family- "No.  We are not telling anyone."  
  
"But I-"  
  
"I'm right, you're wrong.  I'm smart, you're dumb.  Got it?  Besides, you promised."  She straightened up and held her head a little higher, her hair swaying against her shoulders as she did.  "We're not going to do this, you and I.  We're not going to tell anyone."  
  
"Then what are we gonna do?  Because if you're saying you don't think we can raise it, I don't know what else we can..."  
  
He kept asking as if she had any answers.  Was he blind as well as being stupid?  Did she  _look_  like she knew what they were going to do?  She could barely take care of herself and keep herself fed, how in the world was she going to feed and clothe and  _raise_  a child?  And Finn would be less than no help, and even if she could tell Puck - which she couldn't - what was he going to do?  Mow their lawn?  Steal the occasional pack of diapers because he was really good at being a thief?  That wouldn't actually do anyone any good.  "You figure something out," she instructed harshly as she turned to go inside.  
  
"Do I-"  
  
"You figure it out," she repeated, yanking the door open and breezing through the restaurant to the table where she slid elegantly into her chair as if nothing was wrong.  
  
There was very little she could control, but appearance was always one of them.  
  
Puck was finishing up his song, with his full-on charming grin that always got him whatever he wanted - Quinn remembered that grin.  It was all that grin's fault.  If he hadn't smiled like that, she could have resisted what he offered.  She could have stayed away from temptation but for that damned grin that got exponentially more powerful when he sang.  She was just glad he didn't have a guitar in his hands or every woman in the place would be rushing the stage as soon as he finished.  
  
_My girl don't go for smokin'  
And liquor just makes her flinch  
Seems she just goes for nothin'  
Except my big ten inch...  
Record of the band that plays the blues  
Band the plays the blues  
She just loves my big ten inch...  
Record of her favourite blues!_  
  
Finn dropped heavily into his seat beside her and leaned in to whisper, "When you said I've gotta figure out what to do, did you mean-"  
  
"I don't want to talk about it anymore," she whispered back.  
  
"Yeah, but did you-"  
  
"We're done talking about this."  
  
Finn settled back in his chair a little, seeming none too happy and still more than a little confused, and Rachel made her way up to the stage.  
  
"Hello everybody," she said with a big cheesy stage grin that had everyone at her table rolling their eyes.  "For my first song of the evening, I would like to sing about my perfect man."  
  
Finn leaned back over to whisper, "So should I-"  
  
"Hush," Quinn admonished.  "I need to mock this."  
  
Rachel drew in a slow, deep breath, eyes closed, then gave a tiny nod as the band began to [play](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eaqditueOw).  ((Begins at 2:50))  
  
_My white knight  
Not a Lancelot, nor an angel with wings  
Just someone to love me  
Who's not ashamed of a few nice things_  
  
Her voice was stunning, everyone knew that, but there was a quiet chuckle spreading as she sang.  Most of the people who met Rachel found her intolerable at best, insufferable at worst, and the idea that she could ever want something simple was as ridiculous as it was laughable.  Her mother obsessively doted on her and showered her with every lesson, soundtrack, show ticket, and opportunity a Broadway-obsessed girl could want, but nothing was ever enough for her.  She got the lead in every play and the solo in every song and yet still acted like she was the downtrodden, maligned, would-be star but for some unforeseen force keeping her down.  Usually she claimed that unseen force was the director (whoever that poor soul might be) and was compensated for her trouble with exactly the solo she would have gotten anyway, sometimes with the added bonus of a solo that might otherwise have gone to one of the girls.  
  
Never to Kurt, of course, though the two of them had a similar vocal range prior to sometime junior year when his voice started to slip down just a bit, but their ranges were still close enough that he should have at least gotten a shot at a few of the songs she was automatically handed.  Not that he was bitter or anything, but the idea that just because he was a boy he couldn't sing the girl songs was something he was starting to resent more now that he was at Dalton and there seemed to be strange rules about when girl songs were or weren't okay.  His rendition of Over the Rainbow, for example, was lauded; his suggestion that they sing Rosemary Clooney, not so much.  
  
She wasn't so bad when she stopped trying so hard, was the most frustrating part.  In fact, when it was just the two of them discussing productions and a mutual affection for Mary Martin and Ethel Merman, she was actually kind of fun to talk to.  If one could get past her clothes.  And her disturbingly pink bedroom.  But as soon as there were other people around, she started trying to prove how talented she was to anyone who would listen, and when no one  _would_  listen she essentially tried to fix it by  just being louder instead of by lightening up a little.  
  
Which was why the mocking was spreading.    
  
He had engaged in it a time or two, he couldn't lie that much, but that was at McKinley with a 'kill or be killed' mentality.  At Dalton, where they didn't do this kind of petty crap and just existed and he saw how nice that could be?  He felt a little bad laughing at her.  Especially because he knew how frustrating it could be to not have a true creative outlet, and she had to be going crazy this year without anyone to tell her how great she was.  So he kept his snickering to a minimum - unlike the former Cheerios who were practically guffawing over there.  
  
_My white knight  
What my heart would say if it only knew how  
Please, dear Venus,  
Show me now_  
  
She was staring at him.  
  
He wasn't sure why, but she was definitely staring at him as she sang, aiming gestures in his general direction.  
  
...No.  No, she did  _not_  like him.  She was not singing a song about 'her perfect man' to  _him_.  
  
For one thing, she was not that stupid.  For another, he might have to hurl himself from the roof of the tallest building he could find, and since this wasn't even as big of a place as Lima, that roof would barely be two stories tall and that would just cause an awful lot of scars but not nearly enough bodily injury to get the job done.  
  
But that wouldn't make any sense, Kurt concluded.  He and Rachel had gotten along for a couple years and they did well enough at teaming up occasionally for duets, and they were friendly-ish, but she had never flirted with him the way she flirted with Finn.  Not even close.  She had spent the better part of sophomore year trying to convince Finn to dump Quinn and date her, never with any success, and Kurt was under the distinct impression she had dropped that after she started dating that boy from a rival school who broke her heart.  Now she was staring at him and singing to him?  No.  There was no way she was singing him a love song.  
  
He just had no idea what that meant she was doing instead.  
  
She slipped the microphone from its stand and pulled out as much cord as she could, then began to descend the stairs as she sang, still looking too emotional for the song.  
  
_All I want is a plain man  
All I want is a modest man_  
  
She walked directly for their table, her eyes not leaving him the entire time.  He was in her sights now, he didn't know where this was going but he didn't like it, and he put his hand up to his forehead to try to shield himself somehow from her view.  After all, if he couldn't see her and couldn't make eye contact, that meant she wouldn't be looking at him so much, right?  That she would get that she was to Back. Off. Immediately. and would move on her merry, overly-emotive way, right?  
  
Wrong, of course.  This was Rachel Berry, she didn't understand these things.  
  
_A quiet man, a gentle man_  
  
She stopped directly in front of him, then narrowed her eyes and glanced sidelong at Finn as she sang  
_A straightforward and honest man_  
  
before looking out over Kurt's head with big, wistful eyes as she pictured her little fantasy world.  
  
_To sit with me  
In a cottage somewhere in the state of Iowa_  
  
She placed her hand reverently over her heart as though she were from Iowa (and not Ohio, which while it sounded similar and might confuse Brittany was not by any stretch of the imagination the same place), then began gesturing dramatically as she sang the next long notes.  
  
_And I would like him to be  
More interested in me-_  
  
Kurt couldn't quite keep  himself from laughing at that one.  Of course Rachel's dream man would be more interested in Rachel than in anyone else.  She looked irritatedly down at him, then glanced back over at Finn with the same annoyed glare she had earlier.  
  
_Than he is in himself_  
  
She looked down at Kurt, despite his repeated attempts to make himself invisible, and reached down to grasp his hand in hers.  His eyes widened and he looked helplessly to Blaine for help.  Blaine looked  _amused_ , the jerk, and Sam looked mildly concerned and everyone else was busy just laughing hysterically at how badly Rachel was making an ass of herself with this song and he was stuck there unable to get away.  
  
_And more interested in us than in me  
And-_  
  
She met his eyes with a meaningful look, the first actual sincere thing he'd seen from her while singing in a long time.  Probably since one of the times she tried singing an ill-fated love ballad to Finn.  He didn't like the idea of being in that category.  
  
_If occasionally he'd ponder  
What makes Shakespeare or Beethoven great  
Him I could love 'til I die  
Him, I could love 'til I die!_  
  
She turned and made her way back to the stage, singing as dramatically as ever, and Kurt only barely managed to keep himself from practically falling over in relief.    
  
_My white knight  
Not a Lancelot or an angel with wings  
Just someone to love me  
Who's not ashamed of a few nice things  
  
My white knight,  
Let me walk with him where the others ride by  
Walk and love him 'til I die  
'Til I die!_  
  
She ended the song with a long arm-raise, beginning with her palms up in front of her and ending with her hands over her head, eyes squeezed shut as though there was too much emotion leaving her for her to bear to see it go.  Kurt knew that face; he didn't believe a second of it.  It was her overly dramatic "I'm in such pain as I sing" face, always brought out for a supposedly-moving performance though he had yet to be swayed by it even under the best of circumstances, like when she had sung a song he particularly enjoyed and had sung it well and hadn't tried to proposition him in the middle of it.  
  
The applause varied in enthusiasm, from the dutiful - Rachel's former choirmates and the regulars who were kind of tired of her obsessive solo-hogging on nights when she came by - to the enthusiastic - everyone else.  She beamed proudly, then descended the stairs to the right of the stage and made her way quickly back to the table, pausing to gush to the few patrons who told her what a great job she'd done.    
  
Rather than retaking her seat, she stood in front of Kurt, staring down at him; it was an unusual position for her, being taller than someone, and Kurt kept his bemused smile at the thought just barely concealed.  "Well?"  
  
"Well, what?" Kurt asked, blinking.  
  
"What did you think?"  
  
Rachel never asked people what they thought without an agenda.  He would have assumed it was a desperate plea for compliments, but they had known each other more than long enough to know that wasn't going to happen.  She may have been single-mindedly obsessive about her talent and how fantastic she was in her own mind, but she'd been subjected to harsh comments almost as often as he had in school.  It wasn't as though the two of them were particularly friendly when it came to evaluations of each others' performances, either.    
  
And he wasn't so wild about how much of it had been sung  _at him_.  
  
"I think if you're expecting someone to talk about Shakespeare and Beethoven in Iowa, clearly you're going to be looking awhile," he replied smoothly, his eyebrow raised skeptically as he tried to figure out what her angle was.  
  
"I know you know that song - you were talking last night about the footbridge scene being romantic.  I meant about the performance.  And the sentiment behind it, because you as much as anyone I know respond to music on an emotional level."  
  
Kurt fought the urge to roll his eyes at her enthusiasm.  "What are you looking for, Rachel? Because clearly you're fishing for something, and I'm not sure-"  Rachel glanced over at their friends at the rest of the table, then grabbed his hand and pulled him from his seat with a surprising bit of strength, and using his shock-induced pliancy to her advantage.  "Okay, have you lost your mind? This-"  
  
She pulled him quickly down a hallway where Kurt seemed to remember the bathrooms being, then through a door off to the right that led to a room about the size of a cloakroom with several racks of old costumes and stagewear lining the room.  The only light came from a dim bare bulb at the ceiling, and the look on Rachel's face was one of enthusiastic determination.  
  
Oh dear god.  She was going to try to make out with him, wasn't she?  Because first she sang him a love song, a song about finding her ideal companion, and then she shoved him into a costume room and-  
  
He had to get out of there.

He tried to step past her, but she stood in front of the door.  "Rachel, what are you doing?"  
  
"I need to talk to you."  
  
"Given the circumstances, you'll understand if I don't believe that's what you intend to do right now," he stated, his voice tight and higher than he would have preferred as he tried to figure out just how to get past her.  He couldn't hit her or shove her, she was a girl and a lot smaller than he was, and while he was fast the room was cramped and their position awkward enough that he doubted he could get around her to the door without slamming her accidentally into something.  And even if that something was just a rack of fabulous hats from the 1920s and a rod holding several Andrews Sisters-style decorated uniforms, he couldn't do that.  She was a  _girl_.  
  
That really was the root of all his problems at the moment, wasn't it?  
  
"I think we should date, Kurt.  I think I should be your girlfriend-"  
  
"Oh my god," he mumbled, rolling his eyes.  He was hoping that when he looked her in the eye again, she would be smiling, making it clear she was joking, that she was just trying to distract him while she did something ridiculous.  He didn't even know what he was hoping the excuse would be, but anything would be better than-  
  
...She was serious.  The determined set of her jaw, the earnest look in her dark eyes, the slight purse of her lips when he didn't immediately agree...she had actually meant it.  She wanted to-  
  
"Rachel, I...I say this with all  _possible_  affection and in the spirit of whatever friendship we have - however competitive and at times acrimonious it may be.  I don't think that's a very good idea."  
  
"Why not?" she asked.  
  
The way she was staring him in the eye was making him incredibly uncomfortable - or was that just the fact that he was trapped in a tiny room with a pixie who had gone completely crazy?  Because that could absolutely be the reason.  That and the fact that he had to find a nice way of telling her he wasn't interested without telling her why precisely he wasn't interested, because everyone knew she couldn't keep her mouth shut to save her life.  If it weren't for her incredible voice, he would have suggested taping her mouth shut years ago - and he was one of the people who halfway liked her, as opposed to Quinn or Puck or any number of other people they knew.  
  
If he was being entirely honest, this shouldn't have been the first time the issue came up.  Considering how many girls were always around, how all of his friends were girls and they all talked about how he would make such a great boyfriend if ever they broke up with the boyfriends they already had...it had come up exactly once, actually.  Brittany had tried to tell him they should make out, he politely informed her he was allergic to the wool sweater of the Cheerios uniform, and that had been that.  That had been before he knew  _why_  he wasn't interested, but he'd always known that he didn't feel any particular desire to kiss the pretty girls the way Finn or Puck did.  
  
Not that he was necessarily saying Rachel was pretty, he didn't actually know.  He knew she was talented and driven and a compulsive overachiever who needed to ensure that everyone knew how talented and driven she was.  He knew her clothing made him want to light her on fire - okay, or at least her entire closet.    
  
And he knew that he did not under any circumstances want to be her boyfriend.  Or anyone's boyfriend.  
  
...Unless boys could have boyfriends, in which case he might reconsider.  He didn't know if that was something people did.  If that was how the strange-sounding "homosexual marriage" thing that Man #16 and a few others in the report had...started.  After all, Finn was Quinn's boyfriend and then they would get married, so theoretically that would mean that boys could have boyfriends and then get...homosexually married? Whatever that meant.  
  
But that was another question for another day.  Right now, the much more important question was how to get Rachel to back the hell off and let him out of the damned closet before either he suffocated or she did something stupid like try to kiss him.  
  
"Because I don't like you that way," he replied as nicely and politely as he could muster.  It wasn't her fault he couldn't be interested, after all, and if he liked girls, maybe...maybe it would work.  Probably not, he would probably want to throw her off the top of a very tall building after approximately twenty minutes judging by her generally over-controlling nature and obsessive need to be right, but she wasn't inherently horrible once a person got used to her, and he kind of had.  A little bit, at least.  
  
"And what way is that?" she asked, but she didn't sound...annoyed.  More like she was trying to get something out of him that he wasn't about to give.  
  
"Like a boy should like his girlfriend," he replied evenly, but the intense look on her face had gotten worse even just in the past three minutes and he found himself adding, "It's not you, I don't like another girl that way either-"  
  
"Kurt.  You're never going to find 'the right girl.'  I- I know that's what people say, and you're talented and attractive, but you're not going to find 'the right girl.'"  She reached out to grab his hand in hers, then added more quietly, "I know what you are, Kurt."  
  
He froze, his heart racing so fast he could barely catch his breath as he stood ramrod straight among a sea of sequins and silk velvet and faux-fur.  No.  She-... _no_.  He must have misheard that, or misunderstood.  Because if she could guess, and she was not exactly the most observant person in the world (she was barely a step above Finn sometimes, which was downright sad), then did that mean everyone could guess?  Just because he wasn't crazy didn't mean he wanted everyone to know, not yet, not until he knew what it meant and how to- how to deal with any of it better.  Just because it was apparently something semi-normal in the world and the animal kingdom didn't mean it was normal enough in the scale of things that were acceptable in Lima for him to-  
  
Maybe she was talking about something else, he realized suddenly.  She could be talking about any number of things, after all, or maybe she was trying to trick him into revealing information and thereby making her job easier.  What job? he wasn't quite sure.  Blackmailing him for...something.  It wouldn't be the first time she'd tried.  He wasn't sure what prize she might be trying to win from him now, especially considering he spent most of the time 2 hours away at a separate school with no solo opportunities she could usurp, but regardless he wasn't going to reveal anything.  Not until forced.  
  
"And what is that?" he asked evenly, his jaw so tight it was almost difficult to speak.  
  
It was the first time he ever heard the word 'homosexual' aloud and somehow it did't sound like he expected.  Less frightening than in black and white print in the middle of a medical textbook, but horribly loud and echoey and hollow in a way that made it sound as though she were shouting even though he was fairly certain she had actually lowered her voice.  It felt like every person outside that door, every person in the entire club, could hear what she said about him.  
  
Could hear what he  _was_.  
  
He tried to wrap his arms around himself, to curl in on himself and disappear somehow, but her hands on his forearms stopped him.  "It's okay - so is my father," she stated.  "He lives with his homosexual lover, a negro man, near Cleveland."  He wasn't sure what in the world to do with that information (or her word choices, honestly).  "I'm not supposed to know that's why he and my mom divorced, but neither of them are great at keeping their conversations quiet.  I've known since I was seven."  
  
"Why would you think I-"  
  
" _Kurt_."  Her voice was equal parts admonishment, pity, wishing he would just say it already, and wanting to chastise him for thinking it wasn't obvious.  He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to figure out some way out of this situation with his dignity - and his secret - intact, but he couldn't come up with any and it felt like everything was so-  "It's okay," she repeated quietly.  "I won't tell anyone.  I...I just thought if we dated, it might-"  
  
"What?" he laughed bitterly.  "It might what?  Make me not be anymore?"  
  
"No.  I mean, I wouldn't complain if you weren't - you're certainly handsome, even if you do use strange things in your hair and dress in such a way that no one will ever see your skin."  His eyes narrowed at the accusation, but she continued.  "But I'm under no illusions that it would change you."  
  
"Then what's in this for you?" he asked, his tone icy.  "We both know you don't do anything out of the goodness of your heart, everything you do is so you'll get something out of it.  What does being my fake-girlfriend get you?"  
  
She withdrew for a moment, looked thoughtful, then offered, "Out."  
  
"Excuse me?"  
  
"You and I both know what happens to most of the people in this town, Kurt, to everyone - they marry the person they date in high school, they settle down, the men go to work at some job in town and the women get pregnant and- and have kids?  That's all anyone has around here.  That's all most people  _want_  around here.  But I'm too talented for that.  I refuse to waste my voice and my abilities on singing lullabies when my true passion lies out there, on a stage with a thousand people watching me."  Her flare for the dramatic was back in its finest form, and the way she looked off to the side Kurt swore she was actually seeing a cheering crowd as she spoke.  If he wanted to, now would be his chance to get past her and out, while she was lost in her fantasy...but he didn't run.  He was almost intrigued.  "You understand that," she added.  "You're not staying here, I've heard you and Mercedes talking about leaving, going to New York, pursuing creative careers...you're the only boy in this town who won't try to tie me down."  
  
"So you want to date me so you don't have to get married and have kids," Kurt repeated dryly, skeptical.  "Did it ever occur to you to just not date anyone? Then you'd be free to leave when you want, find some guy in New York."  
  
She blushed, looked away, and rolled her eyes at herself.  "It's not-..that's the biggest reason, but it's not the only one," she allowed.  "Just because I know you're not my real boyfriend doesn't mean everyone else would know that, and I could certainly use the boost in reputation that would come with dating someone."  
  
"Really."  
  
"It would help your reputation, too," she replied defensively.  "This isn't  _just_  for me, it benefits you, too."  
  
"No one likes you enough for it to help me."  This was ridiculous.  Completely absurd.  She was out of her mind if she thought he was seriously going to consider helping her that much.  He started past her to the door, but her next statement stopped him.  
  
"No, but they wouldn't be able to say the things that are starting to-"  
  
His hand froze on the knob and he turned back to face her.  "What things?"  
  
"About..." She looked him up and down as if to say 'exactly what we've been talking about.'  He wasn't sure when it had started, when it had turned from 'wimp' and 'sissy' to...to  _that_.  He wondered if Finn knew.  Probably not, right? Finn was oblivious to pretty much everything going on around him.  "If you had a girlfriend - especially one who is notoriously horrible at keeping secrets?"  
  
"So you would be my cover," he surmised, still skeptical.  
  
"And you would be mine," she added.  "No pressure on either of us.  I wouldn't have to stay here, and you would have a girlfriend who would never pressure you to do anything except hold hands and maybe kiss in public every once in awhile if people get suspicious."  She hesitated, then added, "I meant what I was singing.  I know the...sensual side of relationships are important, but frankly I'm less interested in that than I am in everything else.  I want someone I can  _talk_  to, someone who...who doesn't treat me like I'm horribly irritating."  
  
"You are...but only sometimes," he added quietly, and both knew there wasn't harshness behind the words - not like there ordinarily would have been.  
  
"You know about everything I'm interested in, and you like talking about it.  Where else am I going to find a boyfriend like that?  Certainly not in  _Finn_."  
  
She would find it in Blaine.  If Blaine was interested, and he didn't know yet.  Because it would seem like they were the same, but then Blaine would get kind of flirty with Rachel or talk about musicals with her instead of with him, or ask about being alone and never mention anything about feeling the way that he felt, and it was all so....so  _murky_.  And the idea that Blaine might not be like him was too much to contemplate, too isolating - really did make him the only one in the world except those thirty-some guys out there somewhere in the US that he would probably never find.  So he bypassed his first response and went with his second.  "Is this some ploy to get to hang out at my house and stare at my stepbrother?"  
  
That worked.  That was snarky.  Snarky was a lot safer than asking if she was going to try to date the one and only boy he'd ever felt this way about when he didn't know which of the two of them Blaine would choose.  
  
"No.  I just-...I'm over that now," she replied, but he didn't believe it for a second.  "He's with Quinn, and I know they're going to get married as soon as we graduate, and that's...that's what's right for him.  Can you imagine him in New York? I mean he would go completely crazy.  So maybe this..."  
  
It occurred to him suddenly that, for all he had seen Rachel's overly dramatic "I'm singing all of my feelings and they're too big and sad for one person to contain" face over the years, he had never actually seen her  _sad_.  Not like this.  Not like she hurt but was trying to do the right thing anyway.  It unnerved him a little, made him feel like he couldn't predict what would come out of her mouth next.  
  
Though, to be fair, that was a recurring theme in the course of this conversation, wasn't it?  
  
The moment passed quickly and she had on her 'this is a good idea and thoroughly practical' face that always meant something was a horrible idea.  "You're the only person in this town who can match my ambition and talent.  Finn could never hope to have your voice - he sounds amazing and is a great male lead, but you...we would sound fantastic singing duets."  Kurt wasn't sure if she intended that to sound like a euphemism for something, and he desperately hoped she didn't.  "I would have to take the melody of course, but-"  
  
"Let me think about it," he said before she could launch into an entire analysis of precisely which songs they would have to sing in public 'for appearances sake'.  He opened the door and stepped into the hallway, trying to look inconspicuous as he glanced back at the table to make sure no one was watching.  That would be exactly what he needed - for everyone to think he had ducked into a coat closet with Rachel Berry for sixteen minutes and four seconds in something-less-than-heaven.  Rachel walked out after him and cast a forlorn glance at the table.  Finn and Quinn were back now, Quinn cuddled against Finn and under his protective arm, still looking upset but not so angry with him, and Puck and Santana were making out (no surprise there) and Blaine was talking to Brittany with this look on his face like he found her intriguing-  
  
"Think about it," Rachel instructed quietly.  "But since neither of us can have what we really want-"  Kurt's head jerked towards her.  She knew that secret, too?  Did that mean-  "-it's the best option so we both get everything else we need."  
  
He never thought he would see the day Rachel Berry sounded sane.  But right now? She sounded almost reasonable.  
  
Y'know.  If one ignored the fact that her idea was completely crazy.   
  
* * * * *  
  
The house was quiet when they arrived; Kurt had called their parents from Le Chat Noir  to let them know that they were leaving but might technically miss curfew, and Carole had told him it was okay and thanked him for calling, then mentioned that his father had been asleep for a couple hours already and probably didn't need to know.  After checking that everyone would be safe to get home, she had simply told him to be quiet when they arrived and she would see them in the morning.  
  
There were times he wasn't entirely sure what to do with the relationship.  On one hand, having a stepparent who wasn't strict was certainly better than a slew of Disney movies would have him believe was the norm.  On the other, it seemed odd to miss curfew and not have her care.  His dad had never been particularly hard-nosed about things, but Carole seemed even more lax somehow as though trying to be friendly with him which definitely did not make sense.  And he was used to Mrs. Jones as the resident mother figure, and she took no crap from anyone.    
  
Maybe Carole just realized that, now that he was living at a boarding school where they didn't actually have control over him and couldn't really see whether he was obeying rules or not, it was kind of strange to impose rules on him the one weekend he was home.  He wondered if she had treated Finn the same way when he was growing up, or if it was just about him.  He should ask his stepbrother sometime.  
  
But not tonight.  
  
Blaine made a beeline for the stairs, saying something about being exhausted already and wanting to take a quick shower to get everything out of his hair and the smell of smoke off his skin and clothes - an idea Kurt heartily endorsed - and Kurt was on his way up to begin his skincare regimen when Finn's quiet voice stopped him.  
  
"Hey, Kurt?"  
  
He turned slowly to face his stepbrother, who had flopped onto the couch as soon as they came in.  "Yes?"  
  
"You ever..."  Finn hesitated a second.  He looked sad, Kurt thought, which wasn't a usual look for the boy who generally had the demeanor of a slightly-overexcited laborador - enthusiastic but kind of dim and prone to accidentally screw things up despite having good intentions.    
  
"Mm?"  
  
"You ever feel stuff so deep it's like you can't make it make sense?"  
  
Kurt swallowed hard.  Everything these days was like that.  Blaine in particular, but missing home and feeling like the unfairness of the world was just so much he couldn't bear it all, and now this thing with Rachel, and trying so hard to help Sam, and all on top of a new environment, with new rules, and new... _conditions_  that he still wasn't entirely comfortable with...  "All the time," he replied quietly.  
  
Finn nodded slowly, then asked, "How do you deal with it?"  
  
Kurt blinked and thought barely a moment before replying, "I sing."  When Finn regarded him curiously, he explained, "Music - for me, at least - is about expressing things that are too big and complicated for simple words.  About letting the emotion carry you through the song.  It helps."  
  
Assuming, of course, that one could find a suitable song.  He had one for being in love with Blaine - Blaine had found that one himself, made Kurt's job easy.  But being in love with Blaine and not knowing if Blaine loved him back or if Blaine would try to have him committed to a psychiatric facility if he knee of Kurt's true feelings...there wasn't really a suitable song for that.  Kurt had looked, but even Broadway with its complex storylines and myriad of expressed emotions lacked a ballad complex enough for what he was feeling, for what he feared.    
  
But if there was a song to be found, then yes - it did help.  
  
"Goodnight, Finn," he said quietly before ascending the stairs and wondering if part of dating Rachel would mean access to her soundtrack collection; it was the only one in town more expansive than his own, and she might have exactly the hidden gem he was searching for.  
  
"Night, Kurt," Finn whispered back.  
  
The darkness of the living room felt oppressive, ominous, like it was trying to pin him down and hold him against the couch so he couldn't move or think or plan or fix  _anything_ , and he just kept hearing Quinn's voice over and over in his head telling him to figure out what to do.  But everything he thought they should do, she kept telling him they couldn't, and she told him she didn't even want to raise the baby with him, but what other options  _were_  there?  He didn't know how to-  What was he supposed to  _do_?  He hadn't even known this could happen, he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing to fix it, and he couldn't...  
  
...if he wasn't even allowed to tell anyone, how was he supposed to ask someone what he was supposed to do?  
  
Maybe Kurt was right about the singing thing, he thought.  Maybe singing would help him figure out what Quinn and the baby - their baby - needed.  
  
What did he know about babies, anyway?  He didn't even have little cousins he'd seen growing up - he knew he had some, all on his dad's side, but his mom didn't really talk to any of them after his dad died so he only knew his grandparents and that didn't really help him.  He hadn't hung around when Quinn babysat...hey, that meant she knew how to take care of a baby, right? Because he sure as hell didn't.  He didn't even know how big or small they were meant to be, he knew people always asked about the size first thing after if it was a boy or a girl, but he didn't know what size was normal.  
  
The baby'd be big, right? Because he was pretty tall and always had been.  But his mom was pretty short, so maybe that didn't matter.  Or maybe the kid didn't get big until they grew up more.  
  
He pulled himself off the couch and walked across the living room to the bookcase.  A blue photo album sat on top of a shoebox, and he pulled them both off the shelf and carried them carefully back to the couch.  His mom hadn't had time to put together his baby book when he was little, since she was working all the time and trying to deal with him being awake all night and everything, but now that she wasn't working since she was married, she'd been going through and finally putting everything from the shoebox into the album.  So far it looked like she was a little over halfway done, judging by how much lighter the box was than he remembered.  
  
He carefully opened the album to the first page and stared in wonder at the picture of himself as a newborn.  He was  _tiny_.  Like, smaller than his grandpa's forearm kind of small and the guy wasn't all that huge or anything.  
  
How in the world was he going to not crush something that small?  
  
He knew he wasn't the most coordinated guy or anything, and if he tried to take care of it - to let Quinn sleep or something, or take the kid to the park or a basketball game or something...he would crush the baby.  
  
How was he supposed to feed it?   
  
Where were they supposed to  _live_?  Because they couldn't live with Quinn's parents if they didn't even know, but if he didn't tell his mom and Burt the couldn't really live here, either, and he was-  
  
...so fucking scared.  
  
"Sing - it helps," he heard Kurt's voice in his head.  It couldn't hurt, right?  
  
He didn't know what kind of song was really good for singing about when he was scared, mostly he just listened to rock stuff or sometimes the country station, but the first song that came to mind was the one his mom used to sing him when he was little and had a bad dream or something.  She'd come in and sit on the edge of his bed and just rock him, tell him about how she'd seen the movie the song was from when she was pregnant with him and couldn't stop crying - which he thought was kinda weird, but she said it every time so it was sort of comforting.  That story, that song, and cowboy wallpaper...that was what made him feel better as a kid.  
  
[One](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmmqarh2Lv8) out of three would have to do.  
  
_Baby mine don't you cry  
Baby mine dry your eyes  
Rest your head close to my heart  
Never to part, Baby of mine_  
  
He could do this.  Maybe.  Something like that.  If he had to.  And he did have to, didn't he?  Unless she just kind of...wanted to do this herself and he'd come over and help or something?  He didn't know how it worked if the parents weren't married when the baby was born, nobody talked about stuff like that.  Actually,  he didn't know how it worked if there were two parents because his dad died when he was like a few months old and was deployed before that because the Japanese attacked and everything? But there were supposed to be parents around, right?  If they could be.  
  
But that meant they had to live somewhere, and he had no idea where that was meant to be.  
  
_Little one when you play  
Don't you mind what they say  
Let those eyes sparkle and shine  
Never a tear, baby of-_     
  
He screamed and jumped as he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.  
  
Burt towered over him, standing behind the couch and looking at him through confused, sleep-bleary eyes.  "Whatcha doin?"  
  
Finn stared straight ahead, trying not to look like he was maybe about to consider crying or anything.  "Nothing," he lied unconvincingly.  
  
Burt walked around the couch and sat down beside Finn heavily.  His bathrobe scrunched up under his thighs but he didn't bother adjusting it.  "You were singing," he grumbled.  
  
"Yeah?"  Finn tried to sound surprised, as if he hadn't realized he was.  "Sorry, was it too loud?"  
  
"No, just weird," Burt replied.  "And my kid's Kurt, so I got a pretty high meter for weird.  But singing in a dark living room while you look at baby pictures?"  When Finn didn't respond, he asked awkwardly, "Is it a...y'know.  You miss your dad?"  
  
"No.  Not really."  It was true - no more than usual.  
  
"So what's..."  Burt fell silent, mouth forming a grim, tight line.  "You get someone in trouble?"    
  
He had.  He had, he didn't know how but he had and he couldn't say anything because Quinn would kill him, but he couldn't hold it in anymore and it felt like he was almost shaking under the weight of trying to figure out what to do -he didn't know what to do and maybe Burt would know, maybe he- He'd raised Kurt with people around, maybe he knew how all this was meant to work, he'd been a dad, he would know-  
  
"Finn?"  
  
"Uh- uh-huh," he said quietly, the words pushed from his throat in a high tone.  He sounded like Kurt.  Why did he sound like that?  
  
"Did you-"  Burt started to repeat, but Finn just nodded and felt a ragged gasping sob leave him.  He didn't know what to do, he didn't know how to- and Quinn was going to-  
  
Burt's hand felt strong on his back, so much larger than his mom's did in things like this, and he tried to pull himself together.  He wasn't a little boy, he was a man and he wasn't supposed to be crying like this.  He was certain the admonishment would be next.  Instead he heard a quiet, resigned question.  
  
"Quinn, right?  Not that girlfriend of Puckerman's who...y'know.  Gets around?"  
  
Finn shook his head.  "No.  I mean - yes, it's Quinn, she-...oh god..."  He heard Burt sigh in disappointment and somehow that made the words just tumble out of him, like a dam bursting.  "She keeps telling me to figure out what to do but every time I try she tells me I'm wrong and I don't know how to- what to do or where we're gonna go, she hasn't told her parents and didn't want me to tell anyone and oh god she's gonna  _kill_  me-"  
  
"Calm down."  Burt's voice was quiet, steady, not as gruff as Finn was expecting.  Calm.  Good.  Calm was good, calm was...that would help.  Okay.  Calm.  He could do that.  Maybe.  "We'll tell your mom first thing in the morning, then go...talk to her parents," he concluded slowly, as though trying to pick the words out of a soup of potential phrases in his brain.  "We've got enough to scrape together most of a down payment, you can pick up more time at the shop, that should...that should cover enough, but if it's not we can maybe help out.  We'll, um."  He hesitated, and Finn looked over for the first time.  
  
He looked scared.  Like he was trying to convince himself this was all okay but...but like he was still scared.  
  
That was when Finn started to get really nervous.  
  
"We'll take you kids down to City Hall, we can talk to her parents to figure out if it's better to have a...y'know, a ceremony or something.  I mean, it'd be kind of obvious why, you two being just 18 and not done with school yet, but it might be important to them, I dunno."  
  
"What do we need to go to City Hall for?"  
  
"Marriage license."  
  
Finn's eyes shot open wide.  "Married?  I-  No way, Burt, I don't-"  
  
"No."  His tone left no room for argument.  "You're going to marry that girl.  And then you're going to find a house, and work your ass off, and raise that child.  That's what you do for your family -  what a man does."  He drew in a deep breath.  "Go to bed, get some sleep.  S'gonna be a long day tomorrow."  He clapped Finn on the shoulder again, then used the arm of the couch to leverage himself off the sofa before padding slowly across the room and trudging up the stairs like a man twice his age, leaving Finn alone in the oppressive darkness of the living room with the baby album still open on his lap. 


	11. Chapter 11

He couldn't sleep.

He wanted to - oh, did he want to. He kept trying even once it had become clear that no amount of staring up at the ceiling was going to make him able to relax enough. He needed to get to sleep because otherwise he was going to drive himself crazy thinking so much.

The boy in his bed shouldn't have seemed as novel now that he routinely had a boy in his room, but Sam was...well, Sam was Sam, he was sweet and goofy and an all-around nice guy, but he didn't make Kurt's stomach flutter like this. He didn't make Kurt notice his aftershave or wonder what his hands would feel like in his. He didn't captivate Kurt's attention as soon as he walked in the room.

Blaine did.

Blaine's breathing had managed to capture Kurt's interest for a solid ten minutes earlier in the night - sometime around 2, while it was past 4 now, almost 5. The slight hitch on the inhale, the way he almost held his breath as he shifted into a new position, the way his back moved with every exhale-

And that was nothing compared to the exorbitant amount of time he'd spent analyzing Blaine's hair. It was slicked down but not plastered, leaving it fluffed against the pillow now that it had dried; Kurt wanted to play with it. He wanted to grab his wide assortment of products, and a spray bottle, and just experiment until he found something that looked better than the strictly-parted thing. Though the side-slicked look did suit Blaine, Kurt supposed, especially in uniform. It smelled like his own shampoo, and for some reason Kurt couldn't identify that made him feel dizzy and smiley and overwhelmed, as though that was somehow just so damned intimate he couldn't stand it. He wondered what the hair would feel like under his fingers - it looked coarse from here, in the moonlight, against the stark white pillowcase, but he wanted to know. To know what it would feel like to run his hands through Blaine's hair. To run his fingertips down along the shorter hairs on the side of Blaine's head, down the sideburns, onto the dark stubble that intruded on pale, soft skin...across his jaw, his chin, his bottom lip-

Kurt pushed himself up off the bed quickly, crossing to the window. Blaine didn't stir, for which he was grateful - he didn't know that even he had wits quick enough to explain away what he was thinking of.

What was he doing?

Either Blaine was like him, or he wasn't. Either he could reciprocate these feelings, or he couldn't. Kurt could either make a move, or he couldn't - he should, or he shouldn't - and this extended limbo state of hell needed to just end already. The sensation of looking and feeling and wanting so badly it literally made his chest ache until it felt like his torso was collapsing in on itself - it needed to end. He either needed to do something about how he felt, or he needed to get over it, and he didn't think there was any middle ground here.

But how was he supposed to get over it?

And could he get over something that never actually existed?

It didn't help that he had no idea how any of this was supposed to work. He knew how he felt, he knew how others theoretically felt, he didn't know how a person was supposed to navigate the way out of their own secret and into someone else's when no one was about to go around telling anyone else how they felt. If that was the way they felt, anyway. How was a person supposed to know if someone else was a homosexual if no one was willing to admit to it? Were there signs he was missing? He had to begrudgingly admit there were plenty of signs when it came to love and romance and relationships that he had never learned - Blaine's comments from earlier about Sam, about Sam not being able to stop looking at Quinn, seemed a perfect example. Maybe there were obvious tells about a man that indicated he was interested in men for something other than fraternal companionship, and he simply didn't know what they were. For all he knew, Blaine had given him every signal to indicate he was similarly-oriented and Kurt just didn't know it. 

Or Blaine had no idea how Kurt felt. He wasn't sure if that was better or worse. Potentially less embarrassing for now, potentially disastrous for later.

But even assuming Blaine was like him...what was he supposed to do next? He knew vaguely how it worked when there was a boy and a girl - the boy asked the girl if she wanted to go out this weekend, though early enough in the week to be courteous. He picked her up and met her parents and they went to dinner and he held open doors and slid out chairs and was at his most gentlemanly self, then he paid for dinner and escorted her home...and after awhile, they went steady though he wasn't quite sure how that worked either because he usually just heard the squealing afterward from the girl who was excitedly showing off her steady's pin, and then they got to the point where they were Finn and Quinn and pretty much destined to be engaged after high school. How did any of that work when there were two boys? They couldn't very well go to dinner together, or to a movie, or walk around the park holding hands. Obviously there was no engagement - only a man and a woman could get married, of course, there would be no point if you couldn't form a family anyway. But even simple details like who would pay for dinner seemed overwhelming and confusing.

How did a boy even ask another boy to go on a date? Who decided who asked whom?

What did two boys do when it came to dating? Did they each take a fake girlfriend and make them sit in the front seats at the drive-in while they kissed in the backseat, like Kurt had done countless times with Finn and Quinn? That felt kind of rude and potentially dangerous in its exposure all at once. He didn't particularly like Rachel a lot of the time, but that still didn't seem right. And he doubted it would be accepted very well by a girl whose trademark was the constant need to be the center of attention.

Ah, Rachel. With her ridiculous proposal that managed to not seem like the worst idea ever.

He sighed and sank onto the bench of his vanity. He wanted to dismiss her idea out of hand. After all, they didn't even get along a lot of the time - she was so irritatingly driven in a way that made him want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her and tell her that every time she thought people didn't like her because she was Jewish, really they didn't like her because she insisted on being right every single time there was a conversation. She hogged every solo, including ones he was more suited for, she could be conniving when she wanted something she felt was not being given to her, and she tried to control everyone around her. ...But, he had to admit, he did at least a few of those same things when it suited him. Particularly when he was still at McKinley and needed to fight for everything he wanted in a system that seemed like total anarchy. While she got away with a lot more than he ever had, contrary to the usual nature of things and girls getting a worse reputation than boys for doing the same thing, he had begrudgingly acknowledge that their instincts were the same - the outcome was just different. 

The problem was, that meant he wasn't sure he trusted her plan. He wasn't sure he trusted her - not on something this grand. To nail a fantastic note during a solo in a competition, absolutely - she was flawless. To keep his secret when she was notoriously bad at holding juicy tidbits of gossip to herself? Not in a million years.

Except...

No one in town - or at least no one their age in town - knew about her father. There had been comments, occasionally a joke or two about how her dad and Puck's dad must be the same guy because he wasn't around and they were both Jewish (before Rachel pointed out that Judaism was carried on the mothers' lineage and Puck just punched the guy because he could), but her father's "homosexual negro lover" remained a secret. She had at least managed to keep that bit of information to herself.

That didn't guarantee his safety, but it was a hint that she might be physically capable of holding onto a secret.

She no longer had an ax to grind with him, he realized suddenly. She had no motive to trick him into something here. They no longer competed for solos, and there would never be a time that they would be in legitimate competition for a boyfriend because either a boy would be like him or he wouldn't be and any boys who weren't homosexuals would automatically be Rachel's for the taking, and not his. 

(The word got easier to think every time he did it. While hearing it earlier had been terrifying, he supposed that - in time - he'd be able to say it aloud. Not yet, but someday. Soon-ish, maybe.) 

So at the very least he could believe her motives, even if he wasn't so sure about her execution.

But that brought him to the bigger question: Was this even a good idea in the first place?

After all, what if Blaine was capable of returning his feelings but was afraid to now that he had a girlfriend? What if that was a surefire sign that he wasn't a homosexual (was there a word for that other than "normal"? He should find that out.) Did he even need a girlfriend?

...If he didn't date Rachel, thereby ensuring her portion of the trade, did that mean she would then have an ax to grind and might reveal his secret?

He needed to get more answers before he could give her one, he concluded. Tilting the small clock towards the window to check the time, he saw it was just about 5 - by the time he finished his shower, his morning skin routine, his hair, selecting the perfect outfit to wear back to school, and grabbed a quick breakfast, he could go over to ask her the things he needed to.

There were no physical reminders of Blaine in his shower, but somehow the knowledge that Blaine had been in here the previous night (naked! his brain seemed to want to remind him, as though in big marquee lights above the showerhead) gave him the same dizzying impression of intimacy that the scent of his shampoo on Blaine's hair had given him. He shivered despite the warmth of the water and tried to ignore the warm stirrings of arousal in his gut - and lower. 

Just because he was a homosexual did not give him the right to be that predatory - thinking about the boy in the shower like that. He swallowed hard and focused intently on washing his hair, on the homework he needed to finish when he got back to school, on the questions he specifically needed to ask Rachel, and managed to nip the pleasurable urges in the bud.

He made sure to leave a note for Blaine explaining his whereabouts before walking quietly downstairs to get breakfast. He was surprised to see his dad and Finn sitting at the kitchen table in silence, each staring off into space in separate directions. "Good morning," he ventured.

His dad looked over in surprise, and Finn jumped. "Morning, Kurt," came the low response.

"Looks like everyone's getting an early start today," he offered in a bright voice.

"Yeah, guess so," Finn replied. He hadn't been able to sleep either, spending the entire night haunted by white lace dresses and screaming infants.

"I'm going over to ask Rachel a few questions, then say a quick goodbye to Mercedes," Kurt stated as he popped two slices of bread into the toaster. "I shouldn't be more than an hour or so. We should be leaving before lunchtime so we can settle back in, and I know Blaine and I both have homework."

"Sounds fine," Burt nodded, then hesitated and added, "Say, would it be a problem for you to get back next weekend?"

Kurt's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Why?"

"There may be a family thing going on then."

"What kind of family thing? It's no one's birthday, your anniversary isn't for another month-"

"Kurt, just- can you leave the weekend open or not?"

Kurt blinked, surprised by his father's sudden exasperated tone. "Sure," he replied, eyeing first his dad, then the conspicuously-silent Finn. "I can leave it open."

"And get one of those passes or whatever?"

"I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem." Blaine could get him a pass if he couldn't talk the Council into getting it for him, at any rate. 

"Good." Burt nodded and took a long swig of his coffee, then returned to staring into space.

Kurt plucked the now-done toast and began to butter the slices carefully. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," he said quietly.

"It doesn't seem that way."

"We've gotta tell Mom first," Finn reported softly.

If that wasn't a red flag, nothing was. His father not being able to tell him something was big enough, but the knowledge that he couldn't be informed until they had first told Carole- That meant it was big. Bigger than someone's surprise party. And had to do with Finn somehow.

He wanted to know, but at the same time...he didn't even want to know.

* * * * *

Shelby Corcoran was the type of woman who, if she were a little taller and wore her hair pulled back into a chignon, would have made an excellent tyrannical ballet instructor in a turn-of-the-century French ballet company.

Kurt had met her many times over the years at various school functions, competitions, the occasional local production of Oklahoma! or Kiss Me, Kate. He knew little about her other than the fact that she was the only person who believed in Rachel's excellence more than Rachel did, but for all her stage mother qualities she was also herself a failed star. He wasn't sure precisely what had happened to keep Rachel's mother in the area, though he suspected judging form the previous night's conversation that it had to do with Rachel's father (and Rachel), but she certainly tried to perform whenever and wherever she could. That appeared to be a genetic trait. His personal favourite example was when she had lobbied endlessly to get the Lima Players to put on South Pacific (and how she had gotten the rights to do so, considering it was barely five years old, Kurt had no idea) the year he and Rachel were 14. She had attempted to simultaneously fight for the almost-all-white group to cast her daughter as Ngana, the girl who is supposed to be both half-Polynesian and a fairly young child...and attempted to snare the role of Nellie for herself.

She wasn't an unkind woman, just intense in a way Kurt had learned to accept as immutable in Rachel, but the way she stared him down as she opened the door at half past seven gave him pause anyway. "Kurt. What are you doing here?"

"I'm very sorry for not calling, I'm going back to school in a couple hours and I needed to ask Rachel about something. Is she awake by chance? I know she usually is by now, to rehearse." He gave his sweetest - albeit also his most awkward - smile.

She looked at him skeptically, knowing he was up to something but not being quite sure what, but stepped back and allowed, "For a few minutes. She's upstairs."

As if he couldn't just follow the sounds of a familiar soprano belting out Doris Day and find Rachel wherever his ears led him.

Kurt rapped on the door, feeling suddenly nervous, and the music stopped. He tried to remember everything he wanted to ask, the entire list he'd come up with the shower while trying not to think of Blaine being so close and in his bed and having been in his shower just a few hours before, but it was like now that he was here the logical, list-making part of his brain was subsiding and the slightly-paranoid part was taking over. That was the wrong thing for a time like this.

He drew in a deep breath and decided that his best bet was to channel the paranoia and anxiety into cynical shrewdness, skeptical hesitance. It was getting harder to re-don the masks he'd shed at Dalton, and that was one of them...but he supposed that, for Rachel, he would make an exception. 

She opened her bedroom door and looked surprised. "Kurt."

"May I come in?" he asked evenly.

"Oh, of course. I wasn't expecting you - when you said that you needed time to think about it I didn't think you would mean twelve hours."

"Nine," he corrected as he stepped stiffly into her room. It really was a disgusting shade of pink that made him think of a nursery - not unlike her wardrobe, he supposed, so at least the entire package went together. Along with the stuffed bears on her flowery bedspread, the white rocking chair in the corner, the canopy bed...

Oh god. He would be essentially dating a toddler. That felt far creepier than dating a boy.

"How would this work?" he asked.

She sat on the bed, looking up at him curiously. "Well," she said, "What's important is what other people see, right? So it's entirely about appearances. We're both performers, Kurt, that shouldn't be difficult - and while you lack my years of formal training, I've seen you in enough productions to know that you're a very good actor."

She didn't know the half of it. She had no idea how much he kept hidden beyond the secret she knew about. How much of his life he'd been acting just to walk down the halls. She thought what he did onstage was a convincing performance? He'd managed a decade of walking around feeling like he might burst into tears at any moment and no one knew; that was impressive. Though pretending to like Rachel even when she was being her most obnoxious version of herself might prove more difficult still.

She reached over to the nightstand to pick up a notebook. "I've taken the liberty of crafting a backstory-"

He held up his hand to cut her off. "We don't need a separate backstory, Rachel; I asked you for a date after you sang to me last night is sufficient."

"No," she replied, looking horrified. "You can't say that - people have to think you made a move first. Before I sang. Otherwise they'll think that I was the one who asked you out and not vice versa. What will people think about that?"

"About what they'll say to the fact that you're bossing me around from day one and attempting to control the entire relationship when I'm the boy?" he replied coldly. "Also, I haven't said yes yet."

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said. I haven't decided if I'm agreeing to this preposterous proposal yet. I need more information first." He paused then clarified, "So no one would know except us."

"That's the idea, isn't it?"

He supposed it was, but that didn't exactly address his real concern: Blaine. What if the boy did like him but thought he couldn't ask him out now because he didn't know that Rachel wasn't a real girlfriend? Because for all he knew, that Laura girl Blaine had gone with a few times earlier in the year could have been just as fake, but no one in the Warblers knew. Or she could have been real - she could still be real. He had no idea. 

But he wasn't sure how to ask that. Instead, he asked the more pertinent and non-person-specific question. "What happens if we find someone we would actually like to date?" Rachel looked caught off-guard by the question, and Kurt was surprised she hadn't thought that part through before she proposed it. Was she really that tied-up in her crush on Finn that she saw no potential to date anyone else as long as he was unavailable? That was just sad. It had been like three years now, that needed to be let go. Immediately. "Because even if I agree to this scheme...if I happened to find a boy who could - I'm not saying I think I will, but on the off chance I found someone who was similarly inclined...I don't know that I could pass that up, not even in the name of preventing rumours. People have been saying things about me for as long as I can remember. I'm used to that. But if a boy were ever to express interest."

Rachel nodded, thought a moment, then said, "If you had to keep it secret anyway, which you would, then I don't see the harm. Provided I have the same right to date someone if I find someone that I really like."

"Only if you're keeping that part just as secret," Kurt pointed out.

"Oh, I know," she assured him. "No boys really want to be seen dating me, either. It's not that different."

It was all the difference in the world, Kurt thought irritatedly. She had never been shown a medical book that said she was a schizophrenic and had to spend the next several days panicking before scouring the library for any other information that might say she wasn't crazy - the best of which told her there were maybe three dozen people like her in the entire country. The reputation problem a boy might have if he dated an unpopular girl was nothing compared to what would happen if anyone suspected he liked a boy-

He didn't want to argue with her. Not already. Not right now. Not when he hadn't slept and was still trying to sort everything out. "You do know that it can't be Finn," he pointed out with an arched eyebrow. "If he were to break up with Quinn tomorrow, you wouldn't be able to date him without us calling off our arrangement. Puckerman wouldn't object to dating a girl who is publicly dating someone else, but Finn would, and he would object even more strongly because we're brothers. He's not always the brightest bulb, but he does have at least a little sense of family obligation. Even to keep him from stealing who - for all intents and purposes - is his brother's girl."

Rachel swallowed hard, thinking, and Kurt wondered if he'd hit a wall - pushed too hard and tried to convince her to sacrifice something too big for her to agree to. Maybe it wasn't fair, but it needed to be said. Maybe it wasn't particularly equitable considering he still had the right to date Blaine if that opportunity arose, but she was giving up her similarly-monumental crush. But her being able to date both boys would be a red flag that even Finn would see. "Okay," she said quietly.

"Excuse me?"

"I said, okay. He's with Quinn, I understand that, so I can-...I suppose that I can agree not to date him since it will remain something that's not a valid option anyway."

Wow, Kurt thought. Rachel had grown. He wasn't sure how to process that, what to say in response.

He had so many other questions, but they were all...awkward. Personal. Things he wasn't quite sure how to word and where to begin or end. "Can I ask you a question?" His voice was quiet as he sat hesitantly on the edge of her bed, and she seemed thrown off by the sudden change in the conversation's tone. When she nodded, he drew in a breath, then stopped. Where could he even start? 

He wanted to talk to someone. He needed to talk to someone, to feel a little less like he was drowning under this secret, and if he was deciding that Rachel was trustworthy - which, he supposed, he was - that meant he could talk to her, but he didn't know where to begin. Where to start trying to pluck questions from. What was most important to be sure he found out first. What really mattered in all of this.

What Rachel might even know the answer to.

That was where to start, he decided. "Do you-" His voice was quivering and he paused to steady it. "-still talk to your father?"

Her eyes widened, but to her credit she managed to avoid anything cliche like a dramatic gasp or tearing up. Not that the question should have been that big of a deal, but she was Rachel and never so happy as when she was doing something overly melodramatic. Her response was as quiet as the question: "A little. Not often. I'd like to, but I'm not supposed to - my mom doesn't want me to. I'm not supposed to know why, but I do."

"So you're sure that he-"

"Absolutely," she replied quickly. "Without a doubt."

Kurt nodded slowly, then asked, "And he and his b- boyfriend-"

He'd said the word a thousand times before, he didn't know why it felt so simultaneously dirty and warm - like he wasn't sure whether he should want to run from the word at top speed because it terrified him, or like he wanted to crawl into the space the word occupied, all the promise it held, and stay there where it was safe. 

"...They're happy?" he asked finally.

Rachel pursed her lips, hesitated, then responded, "It's no better where they live than here, you know. Lima may be unbearably regressive, but it's certainly not the only place. Did you know that there are other schools in Cleveland - in the city, where a majority are non-white students, that are refusing to integrate? To say nothing of the township somewhere up there where the white part of the town petitioned the state for incorporation to set up its own school system that would serve only the incorporated portion."

"So it's because they're an interracial couple, not because-"

"Oh, no one's supposed to know they're a couple at all," Rachel stated. "I'm not meant to know that part. They live in a two-bedroom house and try to pretend that the room I stay in is occupied most of the year."

"So they're not happy," Kurt concluded quietly. Who would be, under those circumstances? Who could ever hope for that, right? Not when he was what he was, not when-

"I don't know," she allowed. "I- I've only seen them together a couple times, usually they make some excuse about Leroy needing to go out of town for a trip or something. And I can only go up there when I can sneak off because technically Dad lost custody of me in the divorce, but...I think they might be." She reached over and clasped his hand. "I know you're lonely. I know it must be hard to-...I know it's hard for me to watch the boy I'm in love with with someone else, I can only imagine how much harder it is for you, with there being so few homosexuals out there. At least now we won't be alone."

It wasn't remotely the same thing, but he wasn't sure he could explain that to her. He wasn't sure if she already knew and it was her consolation to herself as well as to him. 

"How did you know?" he asked. 

"I overheard my parents fighting when I was seven."

"No, I meant...about me."

"Oh! Oh, that. Well, I had had my suspicions for years. Most boys don't know musicals the way you do, or listen to Connie Francis, or understand the emotional depth of a well-executed ballad. That's not always a guarantee, though - Rex Harrison is a notorious womanizer, Richard Rogers is married and has a daughter - though I suppose that doesn't mean much," she added with a faint smile as if to say 'because here I am', then continued, "But the way you were staring at Blaine last night..."

Kurt swallowed hard. "Did anyone else notice that?"

"I don't think so. I don't know. It won't matter if you have a girlfriend - most people only see what they want to." Her not-so-subtle attempt at coercion earned a skeptical eyebrow raise from Kurt. 

He thought about what she'd said - about how she'd known for years. First, it was a little unfair that she had known longer than he had; if anyone were going to know, he thought surely he should be the first. But more importantly...everything she had listed were conversations both of them had had with Blaine. Did that mean- Because as much as he thought Rex's Tony for My Fair Lady was well-deserved, the actor was hardly a connoisseur of fine emotional ballads. Blaine could have entire conversations at length about the musical power of West Side Story versus The Music Man, the differences between the way Judy Garland sang a song in 1940 and how she sang it in 1955, the emotional depth of "Smile (Though Your Heart is Aching)". That had to mean something, didn't it?

Did it mean the same thing whether he was having the conversation with Rachel or with Kurt? Did that matter? Kurt had no idea. He felt like it should, like that had to be a sign that Blaine was able to reciprocate his advances.

He just had no idea what those advances should be.

"Just out of curiosity, can you tell about other people?" he asked, trying to play it coy and deliberately nonspecific.

"I'm not sure on Blaine," she stated before he could attempt to obfuscate further. "I think he was flirting with me the other night, and he was certainly paying attention to Brittany last night."

Just what he needed, he thought with a roll of his eyes and a barely-covered defeated sigh. He could be making the entire thing up in his head and he wouldn't know until or unless he attempted to broach the subject in what could end up brilliant or could be disastrous. He was on his own.

But he had to try.

He stood and walked toward the door. "I need to get back - school is more than two hours from here," he stated.

"Of course," she replied.

he turned to look at her, all eager and looking like she might break into another overly-moved ballad, then around the hideous room, the open closet door that revealed any number of horrors lurking within. "If we're dating, do I get wardrobe approval?"

She glanced down at her turquoise and gold plaid skirt, then up at him. "What's wrong with my-"

"I don't have time to give you a complete answer to that, Rachel, suffice it to say the list would be long."

She folded her hands nervously in her lap, fingers twisting a little as she considered it, then replied, "I suppose so. I mean, a great Hollywood couple does always look well-coordinated and put-together, right?"

He smiled faintly - victory, however small, deserved recognition. And he supposed that, if he were going to date any girl, she should at least be someone who could understand his desire to feel like a revamped Boagey and Bacall with a Teddy twist. "Then it's a deal," he stated.

Rachel grinned and started to say something about how this was great and she would start planning their first date immediately, but he was already down the stairs. Dating Rachel would be challenging enough; dating Rachel and having to pretend to listen to her all the time just might be more than he could handle.


	12. Chapter 12

Finn Hudson was not a person known for his perceptiveness.   
  
Kurt liked to say he was oblivious, and once he got what the difference was between that and 'obvious', he was kind of offended. He wasn't  _that_  blind to what was going on around him...at least, he didn't like to think he was. But he guessed he didn't always pay attention to details other people did - he thought it was just Kurt who got stuff like that, though, and Kurt was kind of weird.  
  
Finn thought he could say that now since they were brothers, and big brothers always thought their little brothers were weird, didn't they? Even if Kurt wasn't that much younger than he was, it still counted. And he was a lot taller, which made Kurt definitely the little brother.  
  
But even through the phone, even he could tell Quinn was about ready to kill him.  
  
"You told them? I told you not to! In fact, I specifically told you not to!"  
  
He could picture her angry expression, the way her hazel eyes would be all narrow and glaring at him, the way her mouth got all tight when she was mad. He would be seeing that expression until one of them died - and he guessed he would probably be seeing it a  _lot_ , if past experience was anything to go by.   
  
"What was I supposed to do? He asked, I-"  
  
"You may be dumb, but you're smarter than  _that_ , Finn! What are we supposed to do now? What happens when they start telling other parents-"  
  
"They don't talk to other parents," Finn tried to point out. It was true - his mom talked to Puck's mom, but she wouldn't be talking about this until she could stop looking like she might cry or something. And Burt talked to other parents when they came into the shop, but only ever about good stuff like how Kurt was doing well at Dalton or how good he was doing at learning the car stuff.  
  
...He'd be doing car stuff for as long as he'd be seeing the angry look on Quinn's face, he realized hopelessly. Not that he didn't like it - he didn't mind it, and he was kinda good at it he guessed, but it wasn't what he wanted to do for the rest of his  _life_. He wanted to be a teacher or something - maybe like Mr. Schue, or maybe like a football coach or something. Even if he didn't like going to school 'cause teachers made you do all kinds of work, he didn't hate being there the way some of the guys on the team did. He kinda liked it as long as he could ditch the homework part.  
  
That wasn't going to happen now.  
  
"And now they're going to tell  _my_  parents!" Quinn practically sobbed.  
  
"Yeah, about that..." Finn started.  
  
"What?" she snapped.  
  
"I'm s'posed to be finding out when we can all have dinner together to work something out."  
  
There was a long silence, then an incredulous, "Excuse me?"  
  
"Well, 'cause we need to figure out the arrangements for everything. For the wedding." He heard a sharp inhale, then a long silence, then a kind of gaspy whimpery sound, and he added, "We need to get married. I-...for you. And I want to - for our baby."  
  
He wasn't lying about that part. Even if he had no idea what he was going to  _do_ , and even if he didn't really like the idea of being yelled at forever, he did want to be a dad to this baby. He knew how lousy it felt to not have one around, and his options were either to be the deadbeat like Puck's dad...or to be a real father, y'know, with the marriage and the house and the breakfast every morning and dinner every night and all that stuff like they had now.  
  
And he did love Quinn - he did. He had for awhile.   
  
"I don't want that," she stated tightly.  
  
"We would have been getting married soon anyway, right? I mean, we're 18 already, what are we waiting for? If school comes back this year, that's about it right?" Because the only thing that might have been legitimate reason to wait was if he'd gotten into, like, OSU or something and was going to go to college...but they both knew his grades weren't good enough for that, meaning even if he hadn't gotten Quinn pregnant this early he probably wouldn't have been able to become a teacher. "Mom and Burt said they'd help us get a place, and we can fix it up...I mean, if Burt helps, I guess if I did it there'd probably be water and boards and stuff everywhere, but it won't be so bad. And Kurt can help with curtains and that stuff, he's really good at-"  
  
"No," she replied harshly.  
  
"Okay, fine, you can do the curtains. I just thought since you're not-"  
  
"No. I don't care about curtains. We're not doing this. You don't listen to me, why should I-"  
  
"I thought you told me I was supposed to figure out what to do. You keep saying I've gotta figure things out because this is my baby, too - I did. This is what we're doing."  
  
Okay, so Burt had figured it out for him. But maybe he was right - even if this wasn't what anyone really  _wanted_ , it was kind of the only real option. What else were they going to do? Have Quinn stay with her parents and raise the baby over there while he lived where he was and just went over there to visit after work or something? Have Quinn move in with them? Did that mean Quinn would be allowed in his room with the door closed? Should he move in with Quinn and her parents? Because her parents were kinda scary and he didn't really think that would go very well for him. Even if their house was crazy-big so it would fit them better, it was also a place he could break a lot of things easily and that didn't seem like a very good idea.  
  
"No," Quinn stated again. "You can keep your proposal, don't even think about buying a ring. We are not doing this, you and me. You have no idea how to actually take care of a child, I'm not going to raise it with you until you figure out what you're doing."  
  
He wanted to know if she knew what she was doing, either. Because sometimes she was a lot smarter than he was, so maybe she did. Maybe she had like, cousins or something and she knew more about what a baby needed, 'cause he knew that he didn't have any idea. But she thought she could have a baby without her parents finding out, and that didn't sound quite right.  
  
He wasn't that smart, but even he knew better than that.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Blaine gripped the steering wheel tightly and stared ahead at the road. The trip between Lima and Westerville wasn't horrible, but it was long enough that the awkward silence felt like it had been going on forever even though it had been less than half an hour.  
  
Well, not quite silence. The radio was on, and Kurt sang quietly in the passenger seat, beaming as Fleta whistled his song back in turn. The cage sat on his lap, since there wasn't exactly another place for it in the 1957 Caprice's tiny interior. When Blaine's father presented him with the car, his uncle - who had never cared too much if people noticed him and in fact seemed to enjoy when they did - joked "Well, at least you won't have to worry about him getting a girl in the backseat!"  
  
He didn't want to think about what would happen if anyone knew that who he really thought about getting into the backseat of a car was a boy who sang duets with birds better than Snow White ever could.  
  
Seriously - was Kurt some kind of strange non-princess character out of a Disney feature? With his pale, pale skin that looked so soft, and his perfect hair that was just voluminous enough but not nearly as unruly as Blaine's, and those  _eyes_ , and he wore bright colours and talked to canaries. Why couldn't Kurt just be a girl, be one of those princesses, so he could be attracted to him without feeling so disgusted with himself?  
  
Why couldn't it just be easier?  
  
Kurt said something, and it took Blaine's brain a full minute to disengage enough to ask, "What?"  
  
"I said, I can stop if you want - I know it's probably distracting. Especially with Fleta here," he added in this kind of babytalk that should have sounded ridiculous. It did, but Blaine didn't care.  
  
"It's fine."  
  
"I can put the cover on-"  
  
"No, really. It's fine."  
  
But then silence really did set in, with just the radio between them. The only station they could pick up played decade-old country tunes; they had spent the first five minutes of the trip agreeing that it was horrible, but Kurt sang along anyway like he couldn't help himself...until Blaine stopped him.  
  
They lasted all of five minutes before Blaine felt like he had to something, had to engage in some kind of conversation instead of sitting silently like this all the way back to the north side of Columbus. Had to talk about something so he wouldn't just focus on stupid things like the fact that from here he could smell the faint scent of Kurt's aftershave and he wasn't allowed to think about that anymore.  
  
So. Conversation. Starting with the topic sure to remind him that the things he was feeling were completely, 100% off-limits.  
  
"So you and Rachel," Blaine began slowly, trying to keep his tone conversational rather than overtly curious, like he was just asking and cared only insofar as it was polite to. "Are you two...?"  
  
"Dating," Kurt replied. The word felt foreign in his mouth, sounded strange as it came out, was even more bizarre to envision. Holding hands with Rachel around town. Helping her pick out clothes - okay, more like picking out her clothes and telling her what she would be wearing or else - to go on a date, then holding open the door for her and pulling out her chair. At some point having to kiss her - he was trying to simultaneously get himself ready for that and yet not actually think about it. He just knew she would be wearing some horrible lipstick or gloss that would keep his own lips shining for far too long.   
  
Blaine swallowed hard. So he had been right. Well...right in that he'd realized he'd been wrong before. Kurt had a girlfriend - Kurt  _liked girls_ , or at least was capable of liking girls. He really was the only one this sick. "Oh," he almost squeaked out, wondering why nothing he did could moisten his throat enough to produce a regular sound.  
  
Uh oh. If Blaine did like him, Kurt realized, then saying he had a girlfriend was hardly the way to let the guy know that he was available and had particular feelings he would very much like reciprocated. "Of course, it's just an arrangement," he added breezily, with a flippant gesture as if it were merely an afterthought; it wasn't. It was the entire lynchpin, the point of it all, but he couldn't sound like he was trying too hard. Couldn't sound like he was announcing his feelings to Blaine because if he was wrong - if Blaine really wasn't like him - then that would be mortifying at best, dangerous at worst.   
  
An arrangement? Blaine couldn't even imagine what that might mean, if that was a good sign or a bad one, and he swallowed again. "Oh?"  
  
Kurt nodded. "Yes." He wasn't sure how to even begin explaining it, especially if he wasn't going to come right out and say 'She knows that I'm a homosexual and has taken pity on me because of her father and his male lover-' That word felt too intimate even in the confines of his brain, let alone to stretch between them in the Caprice's tiny interior. So he began with the easier part to explain. "She wanted a boyfriend who won't tie her to Ohio. She knows that I'm planning on going to New York as soon as I graduate, and since she will be as well, it seemed like an ideal situation."  
  
Ideal under the circumstances, at any rate. Truly ideal would have been being able to date whomever he wanted - including the boy currently trying very hard not to stare at him in confusion - without needing someone to help diffuse any questions. Ideal would be Rachel realizing she didn't need to date anyone, certainly not someone who didn't want to date her for anything but cover and companionship, and just going off to New York because that was her dream - a dream she had been articulating, by the way, for at least as long as Kurt had known her. No boy in his right mind was going to expect her to give that up for him. Not even his dim-witted stepbrother would be that naive.   
  
But ideal would also mean being able to go to his own school, with his friends, and being able to live at home with his family, instead of going to Dalton.  
  
...Or would it? Because were it not for Dalton and its library, he would have never found a word to describe himself, even as terrifying as the diagnosis was. And if it weren't for this school, he would never have met Blaine, which was a terrifying thought. Especially if it turned out that Blaine was one, too.  
  
The thought emboldened him enough that he decided to press his luck a little bit. Feel things out a little deeper. "She and I have known each other a long time, but she's not really my... _type_." If his tone got a little coy on the last half of the sentence, it was entirely unintentional but not unwelcome.  
  
Blaine blinked, his fingertips clenching more tightly against the hard plastic wheel. Dating a girl who wasn't a boy's type usually only happened when he was trying to attract someone else by making that someone else jealous of the non-girlfriend, or when the boy wanted to date someone who wasn't available, or...  
  
...or in several of his father's patients who tried to force themselves to-  
  
Like he'd tried to force himself to-  
  
He laughed, trying to sound warmly amused; it came out a short staccato burst of nervous chuckling that he worried made him seem deranged. "Really?" he asked, adding, "She's sort of mine, actually, which is why I was asking. She seems like a really great girl, Kurt, you should- you shouldn't overlook that, even though I know you've known her longer than I have."   
  
Blaine wasn't lying. If he was going to like or date or try to date a girl, Rachel would be it. She was smart, exuberant, interested in musicals, incredibly talented - though not quite as talented as she thought she was - ambitious...all qualities he looked for. Just not qualities he found nearly as attractive in women as he found them in men. But qualities that were, nonetheless, endearing, that he could absolutely-  
  
"Yes, but she's still a girl," Kurt stated. He didn't know why he was still going there, Blaine's babbling about Rachel being great was fraught with nervousness, the way Rachel had gotten when she talked about Finn a year or two ago. The way he felt when he thought about Blaine: disorganized, like his mind was racing and he couldn't quite sit still.   
  
But he had to know. He had to put it all out there because if this kept going in the way it had been- It had been less than a month and he already felt less to explode. And knowing that Rachel knew his secret, even as terrifying as it was, had made him feel a little more at-ease somehow. Even though he didn't particularly like or trust her, even if he couldn't guarantee that she wouldn't use the information against him somehow or at least use it to gain an advantage of some kind within their own pseudo-relationship...he felt less alone. Less isolated. Less like he was separate from every other person he'd ever met.  
  
Maybe if more people knew, he would feel less and less like that until it was almost like he felt normal.   
  
And if there was anyone he did feel like he could trust, it was Blaine. He still couldn't pinpoint precisely why, but it was there - something reassuring about the boy, about his steadiness, his charm, his  _warmth_. The way Blaine treated him differently than any other male he had ever met. If there was anyone he could tell, that someone  _had_  to be Blaine because he didn't know who else it might be at this point other than possibly Mercedes.  
  
"I prefer being around boys," he added. He still couldn't say the word, wasn't sure how much he could push, and this was at least ambiguous  _enough_. If Blaine understood, he understood - if he didn't, well. Then Kurt didn't want to be too explicit in what he was attempting to say anyway, did he? If Blaine thought he was talking about being in the company of boys because they were easier to understand, the way Finn preferred to hang around with boys like Puck and their football buddies, then Kurt wasn't going to clue him in. But if Blaine was like he was, he would understand. He would get what Kurt was saying.  
  
At least, he hoped so.  
  
At the admission, Blaine only barely managed to keep himself from jerking the wheel to the side and steering off the road, careening into a ditch. He tried to keep breathing, but it felt so-  
  
Kurt was one. Kurt was sick like he was, he wasn't normal, he wasn't-  
  
They were both like this.  
  
He had been right.  
  
He swallowed hard, choked a little, and tried again; the lump in his throat made it difficult to even attempt to moisten his mouth . Maybe it was because all the liquid seemed to have moved up a little higher as the backs of his eyes prickled with sudden tears for absolutely no reason he could discern. What was there to get emotional over? To feel like he might burst into  _tears_  over?  
  
He really was a sissy fag, wasn't he?  
  
But at least he wasn't the only one.  
  
He wasn't sure what that helped. He had no idea why that made him feel like this, like there was something extra he could do now - not  _that_  something extra that it took two similarly-inclined men for, of course, he would never do that. That would be much too far and mean he needed immediate treatment. That would mean he was getting worse, and he knew thanks to his father that once men started, once the erotic feelings gave way to action, that the case got much more difficult. But it still felt...comforting, a little bit. To know that someone else felt like he did. Somehow he knew, who wasn't just a mysterious case number, a faceless man on his father's tufted leather office couch.   
  
It was also terrifying. After all, this was all Kurt's fault; without him around, Blaine could be almost normal. He could force himself to like girls like Rachel, he could just be ambivalent about dating in general.   
  
Kurt made everything so much harder.  
  
He tried to speak, to say something, but he had no idea what to say and he couldn't unclench his jaw enough to even get out a squeak of acknowledgment. He heard Kurt ask quietly, sounding nervous but gentle all at the same time, "Do you ever-...do you ever feel like that?"  
  
He was torn between wanting to jump up and down and throw his arms around Kurt and hug and kiss him until he couldn't breathe, and wanting to pull the car over and fling himself from it and run until his legs couldn't carry him anymore. On one hand, he'd been wishing so desperately only a couple nights earlier for someone who could understand him. Someone who would know what he was going through. Someone who saw what was wrong with him and actually cared. Someone who would make him feel like he wasn't a disgusting freak because he wasn't completely alone in the world.   
  
On the other hand...someone knew what was wrong with him. Someone knew what he was going through. Someone knew what a disgusting freak he was.  
  
Someone knew his secret.  
  
On top of that was a more vile concern. The feelings he'd been having, that had only gotten stronger over his teenage years and more forceful still since meeting Kurt, the desire to  _do things_...exactly two things had been stopping him: the knowledge that it was wrong, a symptom of an illness and a sign that illness was progressing...and the fear of what would happen if he tried to make a move on a boy who didn't want him.  
  
If Kurt was like him...if Kurt felt like he did, was sick like he was, wanted the things he wanted-  
  
There would be very little stopping him, in the grand scheme of things. Because the fact that it was a sickness didn't seem to matter in the moment - not when he was in Kurt's bed and surrounded by the scent of his shampoo and his aftershave and imagining Kurt stretched across the pillows-  
  
He glanced over nervously, keeping his gaze as far away from wherever he thought Kurt's eyes might be as he possibly could; the boy had shifted in his seat, moving closer to the door, seemed to almost withdraw as much as he could. He looked - not scared per se, but definitely nervous. He thought he was wrong. He thought he'd chanced it and Blaine wasn't-  
  
Blaine wanted to say something. He wanted to spill everything he'd been feeling for the past six years to Kurt and just let it flow until he could breathe again without this weight on his chest. He wanted to explode with gratitude to know he wasn't the only one except his father's patients. But he couldn't get his mouth to cooperate, and even if he could...he had no idea what to say.  
  
He simply turned his eyes back to the road, drew in a deep breath, and nodded.  
  
Kurt's eyes widened as he saw Blaine nod. Did that mean he understood? That he agreed? That he would rather be around boys than girls? Would rather  _date_  boys than girls? Did Blaine even know what the question was that he was agreeing to?  
  
It had taken too long for an answer for Blaine not to know, Kurt concluded. The Warbler looked too scared over agreeing for him to think it was about preferring the Warblers to hanging out with girls from Crawford. A few of the boys at Dalton were afraid of girls because they never saw them, but they weren't  _that_  scared of them. Not like this. Not like they were paralyzed with fear, kind of scared, and Blaine looked like he couldn't physically force his eyes from the road again because he was too terrified of what he might look at or what response he might get.  
  
He needed to say something reassuring, he concluded, but he didn't know how - he was too busy feeling like he might burst into joyous tears.  
  
There were others. There was at least one other. He thought there were 30 in the whole country and they were all at least 30 years old and he could never in a million years find one of them - not with like 175 million people in the United States.   
  
The boy he was in love with could love him back. He'd almost forgotten about that part, being so incredibly euphorically  _glad_  that there was another person he could talk to that it took him a second to remember why he'd asked in the first place.  
  
"I thought I was the only one," Kurt whispered, almost more to Fleta than to Blaine, staring intently at the cage. He didn't know what else to say.  
  
"Y-" Blaine cleared his throat and managed a quiet, "You're not."  
  
It felt like that knowledge should fix everything - like that should make everything okay now. Like now that they knew, Kurt should be able to declare everything he wanted, to talk about how scared he still was by all of this, to ask Blaine when he knew and how he found out because if it had been the materials in the Dalton library because that would be too amazing a coincidence. But something about the way Blaine sat there, so...so  _stiff_ , shoulders hunched, hands tight on the wheel, jaw clenched-  
  
They couldn't talk about it. Not yet.  
  
But it still felt better just to  _know_. At least, it did to Kurt


	13. Chapter 13

  
If she hadn't known what to do a few days earlier when she stood in the parking lot of that stupid bar and told Finn it was his job to figure things out, by the time she stood on the Hummels' stoop with her parents flanking her she had absolutely no clue.  
  
He was going to tell them. Finn was going to tell her parents that she was with child, and then they would- She didn't even know what. They would force her to marry the  _moron_  who didn't even know that you couldn't get a girl pregnant by making out with her in the backseat of a car fully clothed. The absolute idiot who didn't seem to understand that she only liked him when they were in school because they were popular and it was destiny and what was she supposed to do with him  _now_? He wasn't exactly popular without a football team to lead, he was just some boy working in his stepfather's garage and hanging out with his stupid friends on the weekend, and she...well, she couldn't be popular if there was no school to go to, if she wasn't a Cheerio, if she was fat and pregnant and everyone in town knew.   
  
This wasn't supposed to be happening. She was supposed to be prom queen, and be a debutante, and go off to college somewhere that her father deemed "appropriate for a young lady" but where she could get a degree and maybe do something interesting, instead of sitting at home with a screaming infant all day while Finn worked long hours at the shop and she pretended not to notice when he flirted with every pretty young woman who came in with a car.  
  
If there was one thing she did not want out of life, it was what her mother had.  
  
But instead she was standing on the front step of this tiny house and wondering where in the world she and Finn were going to live and whether her father was ever going to look her in the eye again.  
  
Her father worshipped her. She kind of loved that, you know, who wouldn't? Her older sister was closer to their mother, always had been and especially after they bonded so much over planning her elaborate wedding a few years ago, but she...her heart had always belonged to daddy. He was  _so proud_  of her, even if he could never make it out of the office early enough to come to games where she was cheering. He had been talking about her coming-out for years, since she started high school really. Talked about what a beautiful, upstanding young woman she was becoming - not like those friends of hers, who didn't understand what it meant to be a  _lady_.   
  
She needed him so much, but he wouldn't-...he wasn't going to understand, she just knew it. And she couldn't tell him and ruin what he thought they had, couldn't see the look in his eyes once he knew his baby girl-  
  
She had tried to tell her mother before they left the house. She wasn't sure if it would be better or worse to hear this from the boy that her parents had never particularly liked, but she had a feeling it would go over better if she told them instead of letting Finn's family say something first. And as she had gone to her mother's dressing room to ask if she could borrow a different bracelet...  
  
Hers didn't fit. The one she wanted to wear, at least, the gold one they had given her for her Sweet Sixteen. Her hands were getting kind of puffy and bloated already, and her face too even if they pretended not to notice. She didn't want to think about how long it would take for them to notice her dresses didn't fit anymore. Probably would blame it on the fact that she didn't have Cheerios practice every afternoon anymore, suggest she find some kind of dance class to keep herself occupied, go back to taking gymnastics. Ignore it like they did anything they didn't want to think about.   
  
...she had gone in there to ask if she could borrow the tennis bracelet that her mother never wore anyway. It wasn't traditional enough, a little bit too deco for her mother who liked to dress like a proper society woman from sometime before 1920 when "the wrong kind of people" infiltrated the high-end social bubble, and it would match her dress and her earrings and it was all entirely rational except for the part where suddenly Quinn had felt the words just bubbling up inside her, along with tears. She suddenly felt like if she didn't say something she would explode in a gush of tears and vomit all over the oriental rug.  
  
 _I'm with child, Mom, and I don't want any of this and I'm so scared_.  
  
She couldn't do it. Simply clamped her mouth shut in a forced, fake smile that matched her mother's, nodded politely in response to her mother's patronizing questions about what type of dish it would be appropriate to have Esme package up to take with them. The way she said "casserole" made her feel faint.  
  
Her parents had never thought Finn was good enough. His family wasn't good enough, and Lima was all he was ever going to be.  
  
All either of them was going to be now, she realized.  
  
She wondered how her parents could talk about Lima like they weren't part of it, like they were part of some better, secret community that just rested temporarily in Lima. They were all stuck in that town, not just people like Finn's family, or Puck's.  
  
She had thought she would get out of there, she really had. She had honestly believed-  
  
Her father was wearing a suit that she could about guarantee cost more than Finn's stepfather made in a month, and his stepfather did a lot better than his mother ever had. Small businesses did okay, and everyone who had a car needed it fixed sometime. And everyone had a car, so that helped.  
  
It could be worse, she knew that. She could be honest about whose child this really was, and then where would she be? At least Finn would take care of her, would...would make sure there was a roof over their head, and food on the table, and wouldn't end up in jail for doing something stupid like trying to steal a lampost or something like Puck would do. And when he inherited the family business, because everyone in town knew Kurt was leaving and wouldn't want any part of it, they would be...they would be comfortable.  
  
At least Finn loved her, even if she didn't really love him.   
  
She wouldn't be happy, but at least she might not...she might not be some single mom slaving away in a secretarial job and hoping the boss made an advance so she could get a raise. Or working in a diner at the edge of town, or like that ancient waitress at Breadstix. If these were her options, then maybe...  
  
She just didn't want to believe these were her only options yet. Not yet. She wanted another hour of picturing a life somewhere on a college campus with an entire sorority of blonde former-cheerleaders who were smart and pretty and had nice boyfriends and everyone wanted to be like. Another hour of feeling like she could be popular again just as soon as she got into a school setting instead of knowing her life as she knew it was over.  
  
She just wanted more time was all.  
  
The pleasantries exchanged when Carole answered the door were tight, forced, the sort of interaction where it was obvious that the parties had nothing in common including basic rules to govern the conversation. Finn's family didn't do much small talk beyond school, they didn't know art or literature, so anything other than discussions of local town affairs dissolved quickly into strained silence.  
  
"I don't believe I've been here since shortly after you moved," Judy commented with a fake smile brighter than her yellow dress. "I...love what you've done with the living room. It's so...rustic."  
  
 _Rustic_ , of course, meant 'It doesn't match and it came from a combination of low-end stores and secondhand shops' because most people - Quinn knew, in theory - weren't like her parents and didn't spend money to hire a decorator to furnish the entire giant house, then refurnish it a few years later with equally-antique, imposing pieces of furniture. Some people kept things like old chairs that meant something to a person instead of just having value to some auction house somewhere.  
  
Some people didn't just shove away any bad feeling they had.  
  
But Carole just thanked her politely with a forced smile as Burt offered pre-dinner spirits that Quinn knew her father would deem subpar but finish anyway.  
  
Finn was wearing one of exactly two ties he owned - the blue one. The red one was the one he'd worn to the athletics banquet; he had almost strangled himself with it trying to get it off at the end of the night as they made out in the back of his car up at the lookout point. It would have been better if they couldn't hear Puck and Sandy moaning in the next car.   
  
So many things in her life would be better if Puck hadn't been there, she thought with a pang of regret.   
  
It was just the way he looked at her, like he actually  _saw_  her instead of just seeing the girl he'd always dated. Like she was something special, even if she knew she probably wasn't even his only girl that day. He was too charming for anyone's good, this was all his fault. If he wouldn't have-  
  
Something people tended to find either refreshing or terrifying about Burt was that he didn't beat around the bush. He came out and said something if he thought it needed said, though he wasn't a man of too many words so people tended to listen. Quinn wondered if the words "We need to decide what we're going to do" were more frightening to her parents because they were being blindsided, or because they were being forced to talk about anything at all.  
  
She shot Finn a pleading look, a look that begged him to stop this - to stop his stepfather from doing this, from doing it now. She would tell them eventually, she just- she couldn't now. Not yet. She needed more time. She needed them to stop talking because if she could just have more time, she could figure out what she was going to do and then she could just go do it instead of dragging everyone's parents into this. She could hatch a plan if only she had more-  
  
"Do about what?" Judy asked politely as she swirled her stirrer in her drink, manicured nails just barely scraping against the glass.  
  
"The kids'...situation."  
  
She didn't know Finn's stepfather was capable of using euphemisms. He might be acceptable to her parents yet. Not even close, but the thought did amuse her a little.  
  
"What situation?" Russell asked, and she felt herself wanting to sink into the couch at the tense tone in his voice. She didn't, of course; she had perfect posture, it had been drilled into her from an early age, but she did find herself wishing she could just disappear.  
  
"Quinn-..." Carole looked at her. "Sweetie, you didn't tell them?"  
  
She wouldn't be such a bad mother in law, she had always been sweet enough. Warm. Unlike Quinn's own mother. She might meddle, as the stereotype went, but she wouldn't be cruel about it. Might even be helpful when this baby was born and she had no idea how to raise it.  
  
She couldn't answer. Maybe if she didn't answer, the entire conversation would drift into awkward silence and then be filled by something else, a conversation about a play the local theater group was thinking about doing. She bet she could talk about convincing Finn to go out for it - as long as he didn't actually, that would be fine. But they could get a good bit of conversation out of that, right? Talking about what Finn would do if he was cast as the Modern Major General and had to remember all those words?  
  
"Tell us what?" She could practically hear her father's eyes narrowing, but her gaze stayed glued in front of her, at the edge of the frayed woven rug and the bottom of the tv stand.  
  
"Quinn and I are-...I mean Quinn is, I'm not because I can't do that, but we're-..."  
  
"Finn," Carole prompted gently.  
  
"We're having a baby."  
  
She halfway expected yelling, her father thundering about how could Finn do that to his little girl, her mother letting out a dramatic gasp like when a character in the movies gets really horrible, unexpected news. She didn't know why - that would require outward displays of emotion, and everyone knew the Fabrays didn't do such things.   
  
There was a long, tense silence that probably didn't actually last more than a few seconds but felt like months. Finn reached over to grab her hand and she shook it away; they'd held hands in front of her parents before, but not often and now hardly seemed like the time, what with the mental image they had now of what the two of them had done (however fictional).  
  
It was Burt who finally broke through the quiet to speak frankly, full of practicality and welcome forethought. Even if she wanted nothing to do with his plan, the fact that he had one was vaguely reassuring. He would be a stable influence, she thought slowly. Make Finn more stable, maybe. If they were doing this. If it had to happen now, which she supposed it did. "Finn and Carole and I've been talking, and we'll start looking for places this weekend - we can put together enough for a down payment, get the kids started a little bit." He didn't mention that her parents should chip in what they could afford which would be considerably more than he could, which was classier than Quinn expected. Her parents tended to react to people of Burt and Carole's "standing" with more than a bit of disdain, to act as though they were practically animals at the trough, but they weren't so different. None of them were.  
  
She hoped so, at least. Teen mothers hardly grew up to become millionaires. Any dreams of a future that included the finer things in life were out the window now, weren't they?  
  
She wondered if Carole had been through this, if that was why she was so calm and sympathetic. She wasn't sure if that was reassuring or not.  
  
Burt was still talking. "Now, I dunno if you think there should be a wedding, or if you think that'll draw more attention to it all. Weddings are kinda for the bride anyway, so it's up to-"  
  
"I don't understand what's going on here." Russell's voice was quiet but firm, strong, allowing no room for argument or interruption of his interruption. "Now, you invite us over here to tell us that my youngest daughter is pregnant, and you're talking about weddings?"  
  
"How do we even know what you're telling us is true?"  
  
Her mother's question made her want to scream. She had known, she had to. She knew, but was too afraid to say anything because if neither of them said it, then it wasn't happening. Quinn wondered if it was hereditary. No, she concluded; she probably learned it. She learned from her mother, who learned from her mother, who learned from her mother the Victorian edict of never asking questions if you didn't want confirmation of an answer you didn't want.  
  
"Judy, why would Finn make that up? Why would the boy ever be the one to come forward like that?" Carole pointed out, and Quinn had to agree with that. Puck wouldn't have, she knew that much for certain.  
  
"Sweetheart?" Her mother's manicured hand touched her chin, guiding it up to look her in the eye, and she almost lost it then - almost started sobbing because it was still all just so fucking much and she couldn't- She couldn't do any of this. Not a wedding, not a house, not  _Finn_ , certainly not this baby. "Is this true?"  
  
She wasn't sure how she managed the quiet "Yes," but there it was, followed by another echoing silence.  
  
This time it was Finn who spoke first. 'So are we, um. Mr. and Mrs. Fabray, I'm really sorry, I know this isn't, y'know, like ideal or anything, but are we-"  
  
"Thank you," Russell said. Quinn looked at her father finally, and she wasn't sure she recognized the man she saw there. He looked nervous - her father never looked nervous. He seemed angry more than anything, which she supposed she expected, but he also looked scared and  _that_  was more unnerving because if her  _father_  looked scared? What in the world was she meant to do if he didn't even know? "But I think we better be going now." He stood and made his way to the front door.  
  
"We still need to decide-"  
  
"No." His voice left no room for argument. "I appreciate your sharing of the news, however blunt and...unorthodox its delivery, but this will be handled as a private, family matter."  
  
"I hate to break it to you, but the kids are family now," Burt stated. "Maybe not the way anyone planned or would've liked, but the two of them and this baby-"  
  
"She is our daughter. And as I said, this will be handled as a  _private_ , family matter." Before Burt could say anything else, Russell added, "Judy. Let's go."   
  
Quinn knew better than to not follow.  
  
It was all out in the open now.  
  
Even though that was the last thing she'd wanted, maybe it was for the best. Maybe it was best because at least now there weren't any secrets. No more lies.  
  
She just thought she'd have more time. She hadn't even gotten to the salad course.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt wasn't entirely sure what the conversation in the car changed, but it certainly felt like it had changed everything.  
  
On one hand, nothing was actually different. He still didn't know if Blaine liked him, he and Blaine were still friends and he hadn't been shoved from the moving car in disgust. He was still a Junior at Dalton Academy, a member of the Warblers a homosexual (hey, look, he was starting to think it almost regularly and without cringing)...if anything it seemed like the conversation with Rachel was the one that had changed things in the last 24 hours. Because now he had a girlfriend, and that was something tangible and strange and  _different_. Something he would have to get used to.  
  
He wondered if he was meant to call her as regularly as other guys called their girlfriends. That would seriously cut into his evening moisturizing routine, and he wasn't sure he liked her quite that much. Especially since their relationship was purely for show for other students' benefit, and none of the kids from McKinley were in Rachel Berry's bedroom at 9:00 on a Tuesday.  
  
If they were, clearly she didn't actually need a fake boyfriend, did she?  
  
At the same time, there was something about the world after the car that  _Felt_  different. Felt...brighter. Open. Lighter, like he wasn't walking around beneath the crushing weight of this secret even though there were exactly two people in the universe who knew - one of whom he didn't particularly want to know, but she had taken it upon herself to declare it anyway.  
  
Things hadn't felt nearly as different after the conversations with Rachel. Confusing, yes, and they had an impact, but this was...  
  
On one level, he supposed, it was validating. He'd been right that Blaine was like him, and it always felt good to be right. On another level, there was something powerful just in knowing that he wasn't the only one. That there were other homosexuals  _his own age_  and  _in Ohio_  - not just drifting out there in some fictional theoretical city, men in their 40s who worked at publishing houses and were known only by their case numbers. Not just in psychiatrists' offices where they tried to rid themselves of the only trait Kurt had in common with them. Right there, in the car beside him, so close he could reach out and touch Blaine the same way Blaine so often touched him - casually, without any particular meaning or agenda behind it. Just a reminder that he wasn't alone.  
  
That neither of them were alone.  
  
That was the real point, Kurt concluded. It wasn't just about relationship potential. Because even if it turned out that Blaine didn't like him or want to...do whatever it was that was the equivalent of dating if both parties involved were guys (he wondered if Rachel could supply him with that information; the relationship might turn more mutually-beneficial than he'd anticipated if she could start answering his questions or at least direct him to her father)...even as much as he didn't want to start thinking about that possibility - even if Blaine wasn't interested in pursuing anything romantic or...erotic (whatever that meat, he blushed at the thought) with him, at least there was someone else who understood. Someone else like him, who felt the way he did. Someone he could tell about his feelings without having to worry about who might think what.  
  
Someone he could be honest with.  
  
In a world where he constantly felt apart from everyone else, that somehow seemed so small and monumental all at the same time.  
  
He was midway through his homework when Sam came in, bag slung over his arm, looking exhausted. He expected his roommate to go immediately to his desk as he usually did, but instead Sam flopped backwards onto the bed with less grace than Kurt would have expected from someone with Sam's build, rubbing the bridge of his nose.  
  
"Should I bother asking how it went?" he asked sympathetically.  
  
Sam glanced over at him. "Kind of okay, actually. I think. Maybe. It's hard to tell."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"Well...okay, so I told them yesterday, right? My dad was around, we did some yardwork, came inside for lunch and I sat them down and told them what you said. My mom started hugging me like she thought I was dying or something," Sam grinned and rolled his eyes, but it was obvious the reaction had been better than he'd hoped for. "And I kinda expected my dad to be a jerk, but he...he wasn't, really. They let me go out with you guys - which was fun, even if I embarrassed myself. And today in the car..." He paused, like he wasn't sure how to explain it to someone who hadn't been in his family forever, then finally settled on, "They seemed almost...guilty or something. Like they should've known it wasn't my fault but they didn't know who else's fault it could be so I got the blame. I mean, I still don't think they know how hard I was working or realize it's why I quit football, but I was kinda expecting worse, I guess. I don't know. I feel kind of okay about it all. My mom's calling around to find out more about specialists and stuff, so maybe I'll actually get to have a life this year. And stay on the Warblers," he added, but the way his smile pulled awkwardly to the side gave Kurt the distinct impression that Sam thought that was still too much to hope for.  
  
It shouldn't be, Kurt knew that, but midterms were coming up in a few weeks - right before Sectionals, how cruel was that? - and if he failed them then Sam would have to get all A's on the finals in January if he wanted to stay in. And as much as all the Warblers could try to spend extra hours helping him and commiserate over how unfair it was that Sam might get thrown out...that wasn't going to be enough to help. He had no idea what kind of waiting lists specialists had or how long their therapies would take to work, but it wasn't looking great.  
  
Neither of them wanted to say it, and Kurt wasn't sure he could bring himself to lie. He'd never been good at that. So they let the remark just stand for a moment before Sam spoke again. "Anyway. They were cooler about it than I expected. Guess people can really surprise you, huh? Even parents."  
  
Kurt wondered suddenly what his father would say if he knew about his...condition. Was it still a condition? He guessed so. Just not as bad of one as he originally thought, he supposed. Though the study with Man #16 did say that, if the fact that the people were homosexuals were bracketed, they showed no sign of illness: did that mean it wasn't actually an illness at all?   
  
He should ask Rachel's dad. Or Blaine - Blaine would know if he was supposed to still be calling it an illness even though he knew it wasn't actually a problem. Kind of like...well, like Sam's dyslexia assuming he could find some kind of treatment that meant he could function. Only in his case, his 'treatment' was essentially a fake girlfriend to keep people from asking questions - it didn't change how he felt, what his natural proclivities were, just...meant that he could survive a little better in a world that didn't understand.  
  
Would his father understand? Understand that he wasn't just theatrical, that he wasn't merely effeminate, that he really wasn't ever going to get married and have kids - give his father and Carole grandchildren? He supposed Finn would probably have that covered, but still, that wasn't the point.  
  
His father would be kind to him, he thought. He always had been, hadn't tried to force him into sports like all the other fathers. Had never tried to tell him to tone down his clothes or stop walking the way he did or change the kind of songs he sang. And he was better than most men of his...demographic, shall we say, when it came to treating people who were different - not many people would have treated Mrs. Jones and Mercedes as well, Kurt knew that even if it did make him uneasy. In fact, he knew Mrs. Jones had tried to apply to work for other families before coming to work for them, and all of them had serious problems with her bringing her daughter along to play with  _their_  pure white children - as if that made some kind of difference. His father's response had been that it wouldn't be right to take her away from her kid to have her take care of his, so as long as the two got along he didn't see why not. That wasn't typical, that was surprisingly progressive, which meant maybe-  
  
...but his father wouldn't understand this. No one in town would. Treating people the same regardless of their skin colour was a hard enough concept for people to grasp, but at least his dad had a point of reference: they were both parents. They were both trying to provide for their families and wanted as much time as they could get with their kids. It was a small thing, but it was enough to...what? See her as human? He didn't even really know, he'd been so young then he didn't remember and wouldn't have understood whatever he heard at the time anyway.  
  
But this? Not wanting to kiss or date or marry a girl, wanting to do all those things with boys instead? How in the world was his dad going to understand that? Relate to that? Feel any kind of compassion toward that? Let alone-...it was a disease. According to laws, at least from what he could gather from the article about the bar in Columbus, it was considered by a lot of people to be more than unusual but downright  _immoral_ , which he really couldn't understand.   
  
What if he tried to tell his dad, and his dad decided it really was a disease, it really was a sickness, and tried to send him for one of the horrible treatments he'd read about? Because even though there was the study that said he and others like him weren't sick and didn't need to "get better," that didn't seem like the view most people held, even within the medical community. Especially within the medical community. What if he said something-  
  
He swallowed hard and shook his head. No. he wouldn't tell him. There was no reason to, right? After all, he had a girlfriend. A girlfriend he would take to whatever this mysterious family event coming up was.  
  
Hopefully the girlfriend would not spend the entire event making doe-eyes at his brother. She said she was over that, but he couldn't always guarantee Rachel was being honest about things like that. His only consolation was that she was generally such a bad liar that he could tell if she was making something up.  
  
He hoped her powers of deception were better when it came to telling people about their faux-relationship.  
  
"So what about you?" Sam asked. "How was your trip back? And what's going on with you and that girl - Rebecca?"  
  
"Rachel," Kurt corrected.  
  
The thing was, he wanted to tell people. He wanted to just start telling everyone he saw, for two reasons. First, it felt so  _good_  to tell people, once the initial terror wore off. it had felt good knowing Rachel knew as soon as he was sure she wasn't going to use it as blackmail material. It felt good knowing Blaine knew and shared the feelings. It made him feel lighter. Less isolated.  
  
Which led heavily into the second reason: If he told more people, he could find more people like him. Like Blaine. Like Rachel's father. So far every person he'd told (okay, all two of them) had resulted in finding another person out there. He'd gone from thinking there were maybe 3 dozen in the entire country to knowing three within one degree of separation. For all he knew, Sam was a homosexual, too - after all, he didn't chase after girls as much as Jeff or Nick or any of the other guys, and he did bleach his hair (with Jeff, with a big bottle of peroxide in the bathroom, even though Kurt wasn't meant to know about that), and he didn't look at Kurt like he was  _that_  weird like other boys always had. He was kind to him, like Blaine was, and maybe that meant-  
  
...he did spend most of the night chasing after Quinn, though. Which meant he probably wasn't-  
  
He shouldn't risk it.  
  
He pasted on a bright smile. "We're dating. She's my girlfriend."  
  
"Oh, really?" Sam looked surprised, a little wistful, like it was great that his roommate had a girlfriend and all but he wished he could be that lucky.  
  
"It's new," he added, as if that explained it all away. "We've known each other awhile, but we just started dating."  
  
None of it was lying, but it felt like it was. He supposed it would have to do for now, at least around most people.  
  
But around Blaine, he could be honest. That somehow made the rest of it feel a little better.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Quinn was mad at him.  
  
Finn wasn't sure exactly why, except he guessed for that part where he wasn't supposed to tell anyone she was pregnant and then his mom and Burt found out. But that wasn't totally his fault and she would know that if she would answer his calls. Or would listen when he talked in the first place, but he didn't think that was gonna happen.  
  
He didn't really get most of this romance stuff, usually he just took the girl out and was kinda not a jerk to her and she thought he was great because he was better than Puck or Karofsky or one of the other guys on the team - and even then he hadn't really dated anyone except Quinn in awhile so he didn't have much to go by. But. He was willing to learn, and one thing he knew always worked with his mom was if Burt brought home flowers. Even though they all knew Kurt was the one who picked them out and probably the one who told Burt to buy them, it still made the fight end sooner. His mom said it was something about how it was a sign that Burt saw her and valued her or something. He didn't get it, but if he and Quinn were a real couple now - like, an about-to-be-married couple, not like just she had his ring...then he was gonna have to learn.  
  
Because he did value her. He loved her. Even if he didn't want to marry her right now, he really did want to be with her. And he really was sorry all this was happening.  
  
So he went to the flower shop and got a bouquet. He didn't know much about flowers, and Kurt couldn't go with him, but they looked kinda like the ones on her corsage at the spring dance last year. He thought so, at least. He'd spent awhile staring at them because they were pinned on top of her boobs and, well.   
  
He got them in blue and pink - like the baby, 'cause he didn't know if it was going to be a boy or a girl, but he'd be okay with either one he guessed - and took the bouquet to her house. She should be home, she wasn't really doing anything this year. For a couple weeks they thought she was going to have to go to one of those private schools with the uniforms, but her parents thought the thing with McKinley would be over by now so they didn't send her.   
  
Her mother answered the door and stared at him like she wasn't sure why he could be there. "Hello, Finn."  
  
"Hi, Mrs. Fabray. I know things didn't go so well last night, but I wanted to apologize- is Quinn here?"  
  
"No." She looked...not really sad, she was too put-together for that, but not exactly happy either.  
  
"Oh." That threw a wrench in his plans. He held onto the flowers a little tighter - they should still look nice in a couple hours, right? "Okay. Um, do you know when she'll be back?"  
  
"She won't be."  
  
"Okay, I'll stop by-" Her words finally caught up with him. That didn't make any sense, why wouldn't she be back? This was her home, she couldn't just like leave and not come back. "Wait. I...what?"  
  
"She left this morning for boarding school." Mrs. Fabray sounded completely calm, like she was saying Quinn went to the mall with Brittany or something.  
  
"What the hell is going on?"  
  
"Language, young man," she scolded him.  
  
Scolding him now? Didn't she realize what she was saying? What- it wasn't like this was some normal set of circumstances, not if what she was saying was actually true. "I'm sorry, but this is really not a good time to-...what do you mean, she left?"  
  
"Her father and I decided that this closure business had gone on too long already. Clearly she's had too much time on her hands, you know, and if she wants to go to a proper institution next year she can't get too far behind."  
  
"Yeah, but she just... _left_? Didn't even say goodbye? What about the baby?" How could she sound so calm? Quinn just left, she was gone, she up and vanished on him without even telling him - or telling  _anyone_ , and her mom was sounding like everything was fine? Like this was something everyone knew about. What was he supposed to do now? And what about the baby, was she going to come home when it was born? Because that would be a lot more missing school than anything else. Unless...was it maybe not due until the school would let out? He didn't even know. Was she coming back? Maybe-  
  
"Finn." Mrs. Fabray put her hand on his arm and looked him in the eye. "She's gone. You need to move on." She gave him a fake smile that made him want to kick things, then slipped back inside and closed the door in his face, leaving him standing on the stoop with a fistful of pink and blue flowers and no idea where the mother of his child was.


	14. Chapter 14

When Wes had announced at the weekly non-rehearsal meeting the Monday before Sectionals that all Warblers needed to ensure that they would be available for the mandatory group meeting on Friday night, Kurt had no idea it was going to mean this.

In retrospect, the snickering from most of the Warblers should have probably clued him in a little bit. As the fact that Sam wouldn't tell him where they were supposed to meet should have let him know something was up. Generally the Commons were off-limits to students whenever the library was closed as a result of a few too many parties getting out of hand with a lack of supervision in the main academic building, and if this meeting was starting at 10:30 - which should have been yet another clue - it seemed odd that they would drag everyone across campus for something that would take less than half an hour. Surely any information that needed to be conveyed in a meeting that short would be just as easily disseminated in one of the Seniors' rooms, or could be given earlier in the evening.

But, he could safely say, he had not expected to be quite this off-guard by it all.

The basement storage room in the library was dusty, half-filled with boxes that under ordinary circumstances Kurt would have been trying to figure out the contents of. But mostly he just knew the basement was freezing.

Or maybe that was because he was clad in nothing but his underwear, tie, and loafers.

He wasn't the only one. There were three other unlucky souls standing beside him - two sophomores and one junior, all apparently fellow "new Warblers" even if he wasn't sure entirely how since he was still the only one taking care of Fleta and he'd been told that was an honour reserved only for the new Warbler. Maybe he was just the newest, that was why. He knew he didn't remember anyone else being brand new his first week. 

He should ask someone. Once he wasn't standing mostly-naked in the center of a room full of cheering, raucous boys in period costumes.

Dalton was founded in 1768, which was apparently the inspiration for the clothing choice for the evening. They looked ridiculous, all of them - Jeff with his tricorner hat, Sam in a horrible blue brocade jacket (and where the hell had he been hiding that? Kurt wondered, since he'd never seen it in their room), Nick constantly trying to adjust the ruffles down the front of his shirt. Bill was wearing a gold vest and breeches so tight Kurt swore he could see everything, including a lack of underwear lines.

He was lucky that he could be distracted by the humour of seeing every one of these boys in tights. Knee-length breeches, silk stockings, and Dalton loafers.

If the rest of them looked ridiculous, the Council defied an accurate description. Rather than a more relaxed colonial style, which most of the boys appeared to favour - not that Kurt could tell for certain, his detailed fashion history knowledge generally did not extend too far past Beau Brummell - the Council had gone all out, showing their position as leaders by donning the most ornate Maccaroni style Kurt had ever seen. Silk velvet jackets with braided trim - David's had elaborate pearl beading all up the front, around the back of the neckline, and on the cuffs - with elaborately-patterned vests in rich hues (Crimson for Wes, gold and blue for Thad, emerald green with white and black for David) and breeches. There were pristine white silk stockings and less-conventional shoes, but what really got him were the accessories. Thad had a large white organza-looking bow around his neck and seemed completely unfazed by it, as though it was the most normal, natural thing int he world for him to wear. David had pom poms on his shoes and the bottoms of his breeches. And the wigs...

Kurt wanted to know where in the world he had gotten them, or if possibly these were the very first wigs ever worn by members of the Warblers' Council back in 1772 when the group was formed (how frightening was it that he was starting to think of anything historical in Wes's voice, no matter how sarcastically he thought it?). All three were identical and stood at least two feet tall, a high cone of coarse white hair flanked by large ascending barrel curls. On top of each sat a tiny hat that matched the jacket.

He wasn't sure whether to laugh or be amazed at the detail. He'd never understood before when fashion historians referred to dandyism as a masculine movement, but if this was what had preceded it...

He wasn't into this much beading, but he might really want a couple of the vests.

A card table had been placed at the front of the room, and Wes banged his gavel onto it so hard that everything piled on top bounced and clattered, looked as though it might fall off. "Order!" he declared. "The Warblers will come to order."

It was the loudest Kurt had ever heard the group after Wes had asked for order as, instead of falling silent as they usually did, the boys settled into a sort of hushed, giggling murmur. He would have expected the defiance to be the result of a decent amount of alcohol - despite Blaine and Sam's assertions that the Warblers cracked down on it - but there wasn't a bottle, can, or bag-covered vessel in sight. Maybe the costumes had gone to their brains; he could almost understand that.

Wes accepted the less-than-silent room, which was uncharacteristic. "Tonight, we continue a tradition nearly 200 years in the making: the initiation of our newest brothers - the most recent in a long line of Warblers. Ever since 1778-" Kurt cursed himself for being off by a few years in his personal commentary, "when Thomas Emerson Dalton, nephew to school founder and namesake John Dalton, held the first initiation of what was then known as the Fraternal Guild of Musicians, we have held an annual induction of new members. In 1889, when the Fraternal Guild of Musicians voted to permit the chartering of the Warblers as an affiliate performance group, the bylaws specified that initiation would take place on the eve before the new members' first public performance. Which brings us to tonight." Wes smiled proudly; Kurt found himself trying to glance around to figure out where in this story came the part where they were supposed to take off all their clothes except their ties. Possibly that was where the other Warblers had gotten all their 18th century finery - the first Warblers took off all their clothes, put them in a box, and passed it down from generation to generation.

Not really. Mostly he just wanted to distract himself from the cold air and the sinking feeling in his stomach that things were going to get a lot worse.

It was awkward enough being next-to-naked in front of people anyway, as scrawny and ill-proportioned as Kurt felt. Add in the fact that he was nervous about potentially...revealing his secret in a room full of boys, none of whom he could guarantee how they might react-...and one of the sophomores was much more athletic-looking without his uniform on. He'd had this problem a few times during junior high school, but so had everyone so it wasn't considered quite so bad. now...now, he had a sinking suspicion, it wouldn't be considered quite so acceptable. As if he didn't hate his body's reactions to things like this anyway, the knowledge that he was stuck in front of other boys and couldn't even hide himself without it being obvious- He swallowed hard and stared just above Wes's right eyebrow, trying to fight the urge to steal one of the many fabulously-adorned jackets around him. 

"Tonight, as you become the newest members, we-"

"Subject you to the same torture we were subjected to when we joined," Jeff called from behind them, which earned a chorus of laughter. Kurt looked over his shoulder - the boys were still lounging on boxes, draped casually but with a look of interest.

Wes banged the gavel sharply, and Kurt's head snapped back to face front. The Warblers seemed to get his meant business this time and fell into the more customary silence afforded the Council at all meetings and rehearsals. "Now. As I was saying. Tonight, as you become the newest members, we honour that past while looking to the future - to the 181-years of history behind us and the hopefully-longer legacy before us." It was obvious that the Council was moved by Wes's speech, at the very least, even if Kurt found it mostly odd, two of his initiate compatriots looked bored, and one seemed to be trying not to laugh.

David nodded seriously and his wig almost fell off. Okay, now Kurt was trying not to laugh, too, and he may have let a nervous chuckle escape before clamping down on it..

"Junior Warbler Sam Evans: Retrieve the jackets," Wes commanded. There was a moment of rustling, then Sam appeared in front of the inductees, four blazers over his arm. That meant the clothes they had shed earlier in the evening couldn't be too far away, Kurt realized with just a hint of comfort at the thought. They weren't going to be forced to practically streak back to their rooms at the end of all of this - at least, he hoped not.

Sam checked the inside tag before he handed the jacket over, and Kurt was glad to see it was his own jacket and not one belonging to a random other new Warbler - or some Warbler from 1934 for all he knew. It wouldn't have been the strangest thing all night to be presented with a navy frock coat in an Edwardian style with a red-trimmed capelet because that was the uniform worn at the first pre-performance initiation. "Thank you," he mouthed, a little wide-eyed, as he shrugged into the jacket and adjusted it. His fingers fiddled with the button as Sam stepped back and he heard the next command.

"Senior Warbler Blaine Anderson: Please approach."

That was the moment when Kurt knew there really must be a god - because he had a jacket on. If Blaine had come out even two minutes earlier, there would have been...disaster.

Blaine wasn't part of the Council so he wasn't adorned in the overexaggerated foppishness of the Maccaronis...but he didn't look like a stable hand, either. No, Blaine was adorned in a knee-length navy blue velvet coat, trimmed in gold military braid with brass buttons all down the front. There was a ruffled shirt, a deep red vest, soft grey riding trousers- and that's where Kurt stopped before he jerked his eyes back up. Just because Blaine knew didn't mean he needed to know quite so...intimately. 

For that matter, he didn't want to think about anything quite that intimate. Not that it was anything specific, particular, or overtly sexual, just-...he didn't even know. Little things, like the breath on the neck thing from earlier in the fall. Or the way Blaine gave him this weird little private smile that made his stomach flutter. Or sometimes the way Blaine touched his shoulders or fixed his jacket, it just-...it did things to him. Usually nothing that was quite enough to be embarrassing under the uniform, but standing in a room full of boys with all eyes on him and almost no clothing...he didn't need to take any chances.

Blaine strode across the room effortlessly in his jacket, somehow looking like the only person who actually fit into his instead of donning a ridiculous costume. He came to stand in front of the Council, and Kurt almost started laughing again as the angle made it look as though Wes's enormous wig was resting on top of Blaine's slicked-down dark hair. It was quite the visual.

And it distracted him nicely from the way the jacket fell against the curve of Blaine's ass. It fit differently than the blazer, flowed a little more, was just-

"Senior Warbler Blaine Anderson. As lead vocalist, you are tasked with the awarding of awards." He saw the back of Blaine's head cock curiously and could just imagine the look on his face - from the glare he saw Thad giving, he guessed he'd been right. Wes handed Blaine a small wooden box and added very solemnly, "Please begin."

Blaine turned back to the inductees, barely suppressing a grin. Wes was bad under normal circumstances; when it came to ritual and ceremony, he became nearly unbearable - or, at least, impossible to take with a straight face. Still, he appreciated the evening. He still remembered standing there in his underwear as a sophomore while Tommy Krakowski, that year's lead soloist, had stepped in front of him - too warm because they were in the middle of Indian Summer before competition that year, plucked the round Warbler pin from the box, placed it against the front of Blaine's jacket just above the crest...he felt Tommy's fingers against his chest through the wool fabric, watched as Tommy licked his lips - Blaine had clasped his hands in front of him to try to push it down without anyone noticing, even though he knew that wasn't going to work. They were all going to see, they would see and they would know he had absolutely no self control, that he was- Then Tommy grinned and punched the pin into his chest. Blaine had gasped and almost fallen over as the Warblers laughed heartily behind him. They had known what was coming. They knew what he was in for, and he was left out of breath and unable to see straight.

At least it had succeeded in killing his erection. And erections for quite awhile thereafter. There really was some credence to the theory of associating arousal with horrible physical discomfort.

But as uncomfortable as that moment had been...it was when he had become a Warbler. Part of the group. Part of the resident rockstars who had cemented his status at Dalton for two years now, going on three. That was more than worth the pain of getting in.

Joshua was first in line. The junior had auditioned to fill a slot the previous January when one of the Warblers got expelled for trying to light a trash can on fire to get out of taking a final, but this was his first competition. Blaine picked one of the pins out of the box and held it up in a way that always seemed to him vaguely reminiscent of the way the priest held up a communion wafer before handing it over. "As a symbol of brotherhood and musical belonging," he recited, wondering not for the first time who had come up with this ridiculous mantra, "Of dedication, allegiance, and friendship. With this pin, you are a part of history."

Seriously, who talked like that? Or - worse - who sat down to write a speech and came up with that?

Joshua looked nervous but proud, like he knew something was coming but couldn't quite figure out what it might be - and the snickering coming from the back of the room wasn't helping matters. Blaine placed the pin against Joshua's jacket, just over the crest, smiled faintly, then pressed it in hard.

Joshua jumped, yelping out "Jeez! Fuck, man, what was that for?" but it just made the rest of the Warblers laugh more loudly.

"Decorum!" Wes called, banging his gavel.

"The tradition of the punch-in dates back to Warblers trained by the United States Marine Corps!" Thad replied.

"How were they trained by the Marines if they were still in high school?" the wounded boy demanded. He tried to rub at his chest but ended up hissing in pain.

"Warblers!" Wes banged his gavel again, and the room finally quieted to a dull simmer of mumbled gossip and chuckles.

Blaine took a large step to the left and stood face-to-face with Kurt. Kurt looked nervous - as well he should, he knew what was coming now, he knew enough to be afraid of it. But what Blaine found himself fascinated by was Kurt's neck.

He didn't mean to, it was just that Kurt was a couple inches taller and he was trying to avoid the intense eye contact he could just feel coming, so he glanced down and there it was. Pale and smooth and flushed red with embarrassment. Redder than Kurt's cheeks, which made him feel kind of all warm to think about. His eyes flicked down slowly, over the deep triangle of exposed skin leading down into the blazer. Pale, smooth, but with a dusting of wiry brown hair - not much, not too dark, but enough to make Kurt look a little older, not quite like a pubescent boy, definitely not like a girl.

He swallowed hard, trying to think of anything else. Pin backings jamming into his chest. His father's stern glare. How much more shock therapy would hurt than pin backings jammed into his chest.

Why were none of those any match for this stupid fucking sliver of pasty white flesh?

Wes cleared his throat and Blaine looked up quickly, his eyes meeting Kurt's. He seemed even more nervous now, as though the time going by was ratcheting up his expectation of how much this was going to hurt. Kurt swallowed hard, jaw tight, staring somewhere in the vicinity of Blaine's hairline as though he was trying not to-

Oh god. Was he-? No. No, that wouldn't make sense. For one thing, he wasn't nearly naked; there was nothing of his for Kurt to stare at. Unlike Kurt, who was standing there wearing barely more than his underwear and a terrified-yet-prideful expression as though he would not give up his dignity long enough to admit he was nervous.. His problem made sense, even if it was absolutely wrong and a sure sign his illness was progressing, getting worse instead of better. But Kurt?

He had to be imagining things. This was projection, that was all it was. Hoisting his own fears, insecurities onto poor Kurt, all because he confided- Because he admitted they were both sick. But he knew better than that, he chastised himself. Homosexuals weren't all the same; some kept themselves in check. Some behaved themselves. Not all of them were predatory, some managed to live normal lives like everyone else and not taint everyone and everything around them.

Just because he was afraid he was starting to give in to it didn't mean that Kurt was doing the same.

They stood there for a long moment, both boys afraid to look down, to see - to be accused of looking. Eye-to-eye, each wondering if they were imagining it all. Making it all up in their heads.

Blaine couldn't pull his gaze away as he began quietly, "As a symbol of brotherhood and musical belonging." Kurt gave a little nod, as though it was just something Blaine was saying to him, about something more than a pin, as if there weren't two dozen boys wearing silk stockings watching them. "Of dedication, allegiance, and friendship. With this pin, you are a part of history."

Kurt squeezed his eyes shut and braced for the punch, for the quick pain, and Blaine wanted to-...

It had helped him, when Tommy jammed the pin in. It had helped get rid of this feeling - for awhile, at least, and the next year when he was sitting on the boxes in his tight pants, staring at the backsides of boys in their underwear, all he had to do was remember the association and it kept him in check.

Just because he was too far gone now for that to help him, didn't mean it couldn't help Kurt.

His fingers tightened - if he could help Kurt, help him not feel this way...that would be good, right? Good for Kurt? Plus be a decent sign for himself? He knew there was a balance, that...that even as much as his father thought homosexuals were inherently sick and perverse, there were signs that a man was more sick. It was unofficial, not like stages in cancer or something like that, but if...if a person could recognize it was wrong, that meant he was less likely to be beyond help. So if he not only recognized it was a problem in himself, but that it was a problem in Kurt and tried to help even where he couldn't help himself, did that-

But the thought of hurting him made his stomach clench so hard it was like he almost couldn't breathe. The image of pressing forward and making Kurt cry out in pain-

Leaving deep red marks in that perfect white flesh-

He couldn't. Even if it would be the right thing to do, he just-...he couldn't. He couldn't bring himself to do that. 

He pressed forward slowly, gently, stopping when he heard Kurt gasp softly, but it wasn't a pained sound and that was the best he could do.

"Oh come on - do it over!" Bill called out. "That doesn't count."

"Yeah - you've gotta get them screaming in pain," Jeff replied.

Blaine simply tore his eyes away from Kurt and took another step to the left, standing in front of the next inductee, but all he could think of was Kurt and his damned neck.

He wished he were stronger.

* * * * *

This wasn't fucking right.

Puck wasn't a guy who got told he was right a lot, and okay fine, so he was kind of on a first-name basis with the cops who worked the Saturday night shift. But that didn't mean he was stupid or didn't have any idea what was right or wrong.

Maybe his view of it was a little skewed sometimes, but there were some things that were absolute. You didn't pick on girls, you only hassled the kids who needed it, you stuck up for anyone on your team even if you didn't actually like them, and your family came first.

The last one was important. 

His dad didn't get that. His dad took off when he was 8 to try to be a blues guitarist and was never heard from again. No postcards, no letters, no money from gigs, nothing. Didn't care. Didn't give a shit that there was never enough cash to go around and his mom was working two jobs. Didn't give a shit what people in town said about his mom because she got a divorce - all the church ladies talked about her like she must be off fucking every guy in town if she got a divorce. Didn't give a shit what the people in town said about him since he didn't look like his mom or his little sister and a lot of people didn't remember anything about his dad.

And what that meant they said about his mom.

He wasn't like that. He had always said that, when he had a family, he was gonna take care of them. He wasn't going to just run off no matter how great the gig was or how hot the girls were. He would do whatever it took to make sure his family had it all.

He hadn't realized that he might not even know he had a family.

He still wouldn't know if it weren't for Finn being a total lightweight and not being able to hold his Jack. They were getting drunk in the park, sitting on the swings like they used to when they were like ten and really pathetic, and Finn just started talking about how Quinn was gone. He didn't get it, because it's not like her family ever really went anywhere except maybe to visit her sister in Cleveland or something. 

Quinn was gone. She was pregnant and Finn was going to marry her, and now he couldn't find her.

Here was the problem: Puck wasn't an idiot. Puck knew where babies came from and he knew she hadn't done any of that with Finn. For one thing, Finn was always complaining about not getting to do anything. For another, Finn would totally have come to him if he finally did the deed. 

But he and Quinn had. No one knew that, not even Sandy, but he knew and Quinn knew.

She hadn't even fucking told him. 

Tossing Jacob ben Israel around usually made anything feel better, but even dragging him out of the arcade with all his loser friends watching didn't get rid of the sting.

Quinn didn't tell him because she didn't want him involved. She would rather have Finn - Finn, who was a fucking moron! - raising a kid that wasn't even his because...he didn't even know.

Probably because she thought he'd fuck it up, he realized as he stood at the edge of the ravine, watching Jacob try to climb his way out by clutching at trees and vines and crap. She didn't get he wasn't a bad guy. She thought he was just good for sex - whatever, he owned that. He liked sex, he wasn't gonna deny that. But she didn't get that he wasn't some pathetic jerk who would leave her high and dry.

He needed to step up. To make sure she knew his kid was gonna have whatever it needed. That she would have whatever she needed.

He'd marry her tomorrow. It was the right thing to do. They'd have to live with his mom for a little bit while he saved enough money for a place...unless he could steal it from somewhere. But it was still the right thing - he just needed to tell her he was willing to do it.

People didn't look at him like he could be a good guy or whatever because he didn't have to be. But he could do this.

He wasn't still drunk or anything when he showed up at her house the next morning, but he had been driving around awhile. By the time he knocked on the front door, it was after 9, he hadn't slept, and he was so ready for this. He didn't have a ring, but he could get one - his Nana had one she kept saying she'd give him to give his girl someday. He hoped she'd still give him the time of day.

He was running so high on adrenaline, on the excitement of what he was about to ask her and the knowledge that he had to get his life together in the next six months enough to be a father that he'd managed to forget the part where Finn started the conversation by saying she wasn't there anymore.

Okay, maybe the Jack Daniels had something to do with that.

Mrs. Fabray answered the door. She had never liked him, even though she'd only met him like three times. "Noah."

"Is Quinn here?"

She sighed, looked away tensely, then stated, "I'm sorry, Noah, I'm not going to tell you where she is. You can tell Finn that I don't appreciate him sending someone to ask on his behalf."

"Why-"

"Judy?" He heard Mr. Fabray's voice getting closer. "Who is- oh." Mr. Fabray stopped in the doorway behind his wife, staring Puck down. "What can I do for you, boy?"

Puck hated that word, boy. It never meant good things for him. "I need to speak with Quinn."

"She's at boarding school."

"Then give me her address." The stunned look on the adults' face, followed by anger, prompted him to add, "Please. I need to contact her. It's important."

"I'm afraid she's not going to be able to talk to anyone. You see, the school is quite strict."

"I know she's pregnant," he blurted out. If Mr. Fabray looked pissed at him before, now he looked like he wanted to kill him or something. "Finn's not the father, I am. And I want to marry her. I want to marry her and take care of our baby."

Adults respected that kind of shit, right? Being honest and direct and stepping up? That was why they liked...he didn't even know who. Guys who weren't him. 

Mrs. Fabray recovered first. "She's not pregnant," she stated, sounding indignant. "Who told you such a thing? Quinn is a much better girl than that, not like that Santana girl you go around with."

"Finn-"

"Finn?" Mr. Fabray chortled. "That boy's angry. Bitter. That's all this is."

"I'm disappointed in him," Mrs. Fabray stated sadly. "Starting that kind of vicious rumour about her like that. He knows what that could do to a girl's reputation. And because he's angry with Quinn for breaking up with him and not saying goodbye before she left, that he would say that...I thought he was better than that."

Were they kidding with that shit? Finn was dumb, he wasn't manipulative. For one thing, you had to be smart to manipulate stuff. He'd known Finn since they were 6, they were practically brothers - and Finn was an idiot. Oblivious as hell. 

For another, Finn was a better guy than that. Hell, he was a better guy than that! Even he, who no parents ever liked, wouldn't pull that shit. Sandy would, but girls fought dirty like that. Finn wouldn't do that. Ever.

"This is bullshit."

"You watch your language, boy, this is my house." Mr. Fabray's voice dropped to a low, threatening growl as his eyes narrowed. Puck raised his chin defiantly, meeting the glare - no way was this jerk going to tell him what to do, not when he was lying about where Quinn was and why. Not when he was trying to say that his kid didn't exist. No fucking way.

But what could he do?

That was the real question. He was the kind of guy who would give his all to something he cared about, but if he didn't know where she was, and he didn't know how to find her, and her parents wouldn't tell him? What the hell was he supposed to do?

Even if he called every boarding school in the state, that didn't guarantee anything. She could be out of state somewhere. She could not even be at a school - she could be with nuns or staying with an aunt somewhere or something. 

Or they could've sent her for something else.

There was absolutely fucking nothing he could do. 

He turned and walked back to the car, yanking the door open and slamming it shut as he climbed in. He wondered if Jacob's dumb friends were around somewhere to throw around.

None of it was fucking right.

* * * * *

As Kurt stepped out into the chilly November morning, he pulled his jacket more tightly around himself. The sun wasn't yet up, but in the dim light of the pathway lamps he could see his breath forming little clouds in front of him as he walked toward the main parking lot. The bus, they had been told, would be leaving for Sectionals at precisely 7:15, and anyone who missed the bus would be ineligible to compete...and would have to face the Council's wrath.

After last night, Kurt didn't even want to think about what they might come up with. He wasn't taking any chances and found himself milling along the path at a few minutes before 7.

He wasn't the only one. Up just ahead, he saw Blaine - bouncing rather than walking, taking little hops instead of regular steps. It was kind of cute; far less...stiff and proper than Kurt usually saw him. It reminded him of how Blaine had been in Lima - just a little less formal but still with plenty of enthusiasm. The Blaine he got glimpses of sometimes when it was just the two of them.

The Blaine he wanted to tell everything to.

They hadn't gotten a chance to talk since the drive back from Lima; Blaine had a huge project due for Advanced Biology, then they were trying to get Sam's midterms pushed back until he had a diagnosis, then they were studying for their own midterms, then spending every waking moment for a week trying to achieve absolute perfection for the competition...They'd still seen each other, and everything seemed normal enough. At least, Blaine wasn't avoiding him - they were both legitimately busy. Kurt wasn't sure why he could still miss the boy he saw every day for at least a couple hours.

He quickened his pace to catch up to Blaine. "Walking is too conventional for you now?" he teased, and Blaine froze, then turned to face him. He looked startled for a moment, then recovered with a grin.

"Oh, hey, Kurt. Sorry, I didn't see you there."

"Just caught up. What's with the bouncing?"

"Just excited energy."

"Still up from your run?"

The knowing, teasing, flirty tone caught Blaine off-guard in a way it shouldn't have. Kurt got the tone with him a lot, it wasn't new anymore. He just wasn't sure how to process it right now.

Well, or ever. But especially now.

"Yeah," he lied. The run had been lousy - he spent too much time dwelling on the previous night, his pace was off, he was lucky he'd even gotten back to his room in time to shower. 

He didn't know how to do this. How to be friends with Kurt and not-...friends were supposed to help each other. When a friend had a problem, had a condition that needed fixed or worked around, something they could help with, that was what they were supposed to do. Like they did with Sam - he had trouble learning the material, they tried to help. He would do that for any other Warbler.

Kurt needed his help. But how was he supposed to help someone else when he couldn't even help himself?

"So that was something last night."

"I'm sorry - I would have warned you, but it's tradition and we can't." He hesitated, then added, "I hope you weren't embarrassed by it all."

"Oh, no, I love standing around in a room full of boys in my underwear," Kurt replied dryly, but he didn't seem angry. He hesitated, then added, "Though I have to say. Between the elaborate Council costumes, the nearly-naked initiates, the cheering...it all seemed like there must be quite a few of us around here."

He was grinning, Blaine realized with a sick twist in his stomach. Like that was something good. Like it was something to be excited about, the prospect of others in the school being like them. Like it was something that should be encouraged.

No one should ever be encouraged to be like this. He wouldn't wish this feeling, these urges, on anyone; if he could save Kurt, he would. If he could have kept his friend from feeling this way-

Only he didn't seem to feel the same way. He seemed happy about it. Glad to be this way and to find other people...

Blaine couldn't understand it.

He wanted to ask why Kurt didn't think it was so bad. Did he not know what it meant, to have these urges? Did he not understand? Did he not know he was sick?

But he couldn't even start to ask the questions.

"Do you know of any?"

"No," Blaine replied bluntly.

He hoped he never would. He didn't want to think of any more of his friends being in this position; Kurt was already the worst case scenario and he didn't want to pile more on top.


	15. Chapter 15

As the lights went down to signal the beginning of the competition, all Kurt could think of was how strange it was - sitting here in a uniform instead of a hastily-assembled neutral outfit that was based on what everyone in the group already had pieces of, with nearly twenty boys instead of their tiny band of seven. If it weren't for the fact that it was in the same auditorium where he'd been to every previous competition, he would have sworn it was some other kind of event, some entirely different contest he hadn't been to before. But in the plush red velvety seats where he'd sat the previous two years before going on to win two different Sectionals competitions...it felt strange not to be watching Finn out of the corner of his eye or wondering why Puck looked so moved by a performance or whispering snidely with Rachel about their chances at victory.  
  
Not that it was all bad. Blaine was seated beside him, Sam on his other side, and he was looking forward to performing with the Warblers for the first time. It just didn't feel like it was supposed to feel. Kind of bittersweet.  
  
He was supposed to be here with Mercedes. They'd planned it all out and everything.   
  
He let out a quiet sigh as the curtain rose. "Everything okay?" Blaine whispered over the announcement of Crawford Country Day's choir.  
  
Kurt nodded. "Strange being here with-...without certain other people," he offered simply. Blaine flashed a brief sympathetic smile, but it looked a little tight like he was worried he was being too friendly and prying. Speaking of strange.  
  
The Warblers all leaned forward in their seats a little as they saw the girls onstage. Kurt supposed that, if a person were inclined to be interested in girls in a romantic or sexual way, it would cause a sudden rush to be confronted with them after being at an all-boys school for the majority of their life...but he didn't understand the kind of almost animal panting that came from a few of the boys. Nor did he understand why Nick kept reaching up to adjust his tie and Jeff kept fiddling with his jacket and winking in the direction of the stage, as though the girls could see him. Who could see anything with stage lighting? Or rather...who could see well enough to attempt flirting back with one out of like 1500 audience members while also trying to sing and dance well enough to win a competition?  
  
They really needed to get out more, Kurt concluded. Because at some point those boys were going to be trying to find a girl to date, to marry, to settle down with, and what girl in her right mind would date one of  _these_  imbeciles?   
  
Of course, he realized suddenly, he had no idea when any of them would have ever seriously interacted with girls. Where in the world Wes and David and Bill had found girlfriends in the first place. Because if most of them had gone to all-boys schools all the way through...and most of them would go to Ivy League schools where they still wouldn't interact with girls except at sister school mixers...  
  
He should start a class: "Kurt Hummel's Finishing School for Instruction in Interaction with Girls." He would be fantastic.  
  
Not that he had much more of an idea what to do when it came to people he might like, he thought, glancing at Blaine out of the corner of his eye. Anything beyond knowing that he liked Blaine, that he wanted to touch him and kiss him and that being close to him made him feel warm all over (and occasionally too warm in the wrong places, he added ruefully, thinking of the previous night)...he had no idea where to even begin on that. How to tell if Blaine liked him, too, or if they were just both interested in boys but not in each other.  
  
He wished he had someone else he could ask. They could start an exchange program, he concluded, with one of the boys teaching him about boys and him teaching the boy about girls.  
  
Of course, that would require telling someone, and he wasn't about to do that.  
  
As the girls began to [sing](http://youtu.be/u2aJxkmDwBI), their lead singer stepped forward - an attractive, willowy girl with wavy blonde hair cut into a short bob. Blaine noticed her before she even began her strut to the front of the pack; she had really great stage presence. The kind of performer that a person's eyes just were instantly drawn towards.   
  
 _Stupid cupid, you're a real mean guy_  
  
She had a natural charisma to her, not unlike Blaine's own when on-stage, and a flirty smile that had about 99% of the Warblers eating out of her hand by the end of the first line. Her voice suited the song well, clear but with a definite sass.  
  
 _I'd like to clip your wings so you can't fly  
I'm in love and it's a crying shame  
And I know that you're the one to blame  
Hey, hey -- set me free  
Stupid cupid, stop pickin' on me!  
I can't do my homework and I can't see straight  
I meet him every morning 'bout a half-past eight  
I'm acting like a lovesick fool  
You've even got me carrying his books to school  
Hey, hey -- set me free  
Stupid cupid, stop pickin' on me!_  
  
Kurt felt a tap on his right shoulder, and he turned to see a folded piece of paper being passed to him. Curious, he unfolded it on his lap to see round, feminine script. He tilted it a little, craning to read the words in the glow coming from the stage.  
  


> She has good presence but lacks the emotional depth necessary to pull off a more classic ballad.

  
  
His head jerked up and he looked around to try to find the source of the note. It was hard to see anyone in the dark auditorium, and with a couple of the taller boys sitting behind him he really couldn't see much.  
  
 _You mixed me up but good right from the very start  
Hey, go play Robin Hood with somebody else's heart  
You've got me jumping like a crazy clown,  
And I don't feature what you're putting down  
Since I kissed his lovin' lips of wine,  
The thing that bothers me is that I like it fine!  
Hey, hey -- set me free_  
  
She danced across the stage with confidence, the other girls following her lead, and it occurred to Blaine that there was probably quite a bit of talent in that group - at least their lead singer, if nothing else. He wondered if they had any a cappella skills and might want to team up for something. Or if the Council might approve an accompanied number if it was with Crawford. After all, they were always being encouraged to collaborate with their sister school, and he doubted any of his fellow Warblers would complain about being in the same room as a girl.  
  
He would have doubted that any music would actually be produced the first few rehearsals, but having witnessed more than a few evenings of all the Warblers hanging out by jukeboxes while their attractive dates were stuck back at the tables by themselves...maybe it would work out pretty well. He wasn't sure what it would be like singing with a girl at this point - he'd never really contemplated it, certainly not since transferring. He knew he'd sung with girls at his old school, but he hadn't been much of a soloist then and his voice had changed significantly since that year because he'd been 13 at the time. It would be strange hearing someone sing  _above_  him during a duet.  
  
Though, to be entirely honest, he hadn't done many duets to begin with - one with Wes during the annual Founders' Day Showcase when he was a sophomore, and a lot of impromptu singalongs with Thad when they were roommates junior year, but that didn't really count.  
  
He should ask her, he concluded. See what they could come up with. Maybe do a group number at one of the mixers or something - though since he hadn't actually watched them perform before, he wondered if they did anything outside a competition setting. Or maybe the choir at Crawford wasn't considered as cool as the Warblers were at Dalton, which deterred them from performing in public. He could fix that, he was certain.   
  
 _You've got me jumping like a crazy clown,  
And I don't feature what you're putting down  
Since I kissed his lovin' lips of wine,  
The thing that bothers me is that I like it fine!_  
  
Another tap on the shoulder, with another note appearing out of the corner of Kurt's eye. He turned over his shoulder to look at Bobby, who was passing the note forward; Bobby shrugged and pointed behind him, where Kurt saw-  
  
Oh dear god. He should have known.  
  
Rachel gave him a grin and a little enthusiastic wave, then a nod as if to say "Well? Read the note!"  
  
He should absolutely not have been surprised. Rolling his eyes and sitting forward in his seat again, he unfolded this paper and tilted it into the light.  
  


> They obviously have potential, but their vocals are only so-so. Very few harmonies, all of them simple. I sincerely hope that your teammates are more interested in technical ability than in mere charisma, because otherwise you're going to be eating a big slice of humble pie when my mother's team performs.

  
  
From anyone else, he would have thought it was attempted psychological warfare, trying to convince him they would fail so that her mother's team would win. But he had known Rachel long enough to know two things: First, for all her competitiveness, if she genuinely liked someone she did at least want them to do their best - if only so that when she won, it would be a real victory instead of one gained only through the other party's failure to perform well. Second, this was just how she  _was_. She nitpicked performances, which Kurt got the impression was something she'd been taught to do from a very early age if her mother was anything to go by, and her criticisms weren't intended as cruel.  
  
Okay, occasionally they were. But usually only when Quinn was involved and she was trying to prove to Finn that she could be what he needed.  
  
She was just a really intense person who felt the need to still show off her knowledge of music, even if she wasn't performing. And she had to entertain herself  _somehow_ , with no songs to sing or dance numbers to go over in her head.. Besides, they had done this during every competition he could remember (and occasionally during theater auditions); usually they were just sitting next to each other at the time. This was more awkward.  
  
He nudged Blaine gently and made a writing motion with a curious look. Blaine glanced over quickly, then nodded and pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket. Using the back of the seat as a hard surface, he quickly wrote his reply.  
  


> At the moment, my teammates are more interested in seeing girls in skirts, but don't worry. We'll be amazing.

  
  
He read the note over to himself, smirking at the way it sounded in his head - and at the fact that Rachel knew him well enough to understand the confident-yet-joking tone he would use were they speaking - before folding the paper and passing it back to Bobby, who passed it to Rachel.  
  
 _Hey, hey -- set me free  
Stupid cupid, stop pickin' on me!  
Hey, hey -- set me free  
Stupid cupid, stop pickin' on me!_  
  
The audience applauded warmly as the number ended, and Blaine found himself watching the lead singer's face - grinning, exhilarated...she looked the way he felt when he finished a number in front of an audience. It was kind of exciting to see; he wasn't used to being able to relate to people musically. Even with the other Warblers, who thoroughly enjoyed performing and appreciated both the technical and expressive aspects, there was still a difference he felt with everyone.  
  
Well. With everyone except Kurt, but surely Kurt couldn't be the only person out there he could relate to. Surely there had to be someone else out there who understood the raw explosion of emotions that music could unleash, who could appreciate the undeniable adrenaline rush at making an audience feel them along with you. He might be able to connect to this girl the same way.  
  
He hoped so, at least.  
  
The murmuring crowd was caught by surprise when, instead of seeing the curtain rise, the accompanying orchestra [struck up](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmyaoNJIsWE) just as one of the girls from the Lima Independent High School group ran onstage in front of the curtain. She was wearing a red [dress](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3089/2641768627_258bdb6e82_m.jpg)with a wide swing skirt and an exaggerated black collar and belt. Kurt thought it might be the girl he'd seen at Breadstix the night everyone had gone out - the one who had been wearing the fantastic Edwardian jacket. It was hard to tell, all done in show makeup and everything, and he had to admit he'd been paying more attention to her clothes than to her face, but it could've been her.   
  
 _Bed! Bed! I couldn't go to bed!  
My head's too light to try to set it down_  
  
Her voice was high and thin, but she was animated when she sang in a way that was absolutely necessary for the song, coming as it did from Broadway. Kurt smiled as he settled into his seat a little more - he loved My Fair Lady.  
  
 _Sleep! sleep! I couldn't sleep tonight  
Not for all the jewels in the crown!_  
  
From the opposite side of the stage, a boy emerged - lanky and graceful, with a big grin as he crossed to center stage and took the girl's hand. She smiled and rolled her eyes as he turned her into a classic ballroom position, as if to say "I can't believe we're doing this, silly."  
  
 _I could have danced all night  
I could have danced all night  
And still have begged for more_  
  
To call what they did "dancing" would have been accurate but oversimplifying. Unfortunately, Kurt lacked a better word for it. It was a dance, and though only the girl sang it felt like a duet. Like the vocals and the twirling were in perfect tandem, working together to just  _show_  the feeling the dance was trying to convey. The dizzy, awed, ecstatic feeling of having that perfect musical moment with the person you were in love with.  
  
Even remembering the feeling he got a little rush of warmth in his torso and felt his breath quicken for a moment. Remembering the way Blaine grinned at him as he danced around the dorm room to "Zing! Went the Strings of my Heart" - how amazing it felt watching him like that, having that fleeting connection that left him grinning like a fool for the better part of a day...and again as he watched the pair onstage.  
  
It was obvious to everyone in that audience that, if the two onstage weren't dating, they were about to be. The chemistry was incredible, palpable, read in every tiny gesture, the way his fingers tightened slightly around hers, the way she smiled up at him so intently that Kurt was genuinely concerned she might forget the words.  
  


> They weren't going to do this number originally, since the vocals aren't nearly as impressive as what my mom would usually demand. But when they held a pre-competition showcase, I pointed out that the showstopping number lacked emotional intensity and depth. They sounded like soulless robots - technically perfect but not nearing true perfection.

  
  
Kurt rolled his eyes at Rachel's note and turned his attention back onstage. To him, this was perfection - a seamless combination of a beautiful, expressive song, movement that served the lyrics rather than distracting from them or seeming like a contrived pantomime, all while singing with such true emotion, so obviously  _real_  and not put on for the performance...this was the ideal. This was why he loved Broadway musicals; this dance, with the song that seemed so simple and a voice that seemed light instead of heavy-handed, told the entire story of who they were and what they felt for each other.  
  
 _I could have spread my wings  
And done a thousand things  
I've never done before_  
  
He could picture himself up there with Blaine if he closed his eyes for a moment: Blaine's arm outside his, their hands clasped as they twirled across the front of the stage. He was a passable ballroom dancer, having spent many an hour watching more than his share of old movies with exquisite dance scenes, but he was certain that Blaine - with his uppercrust background and years of attending formal parties - was a better one. Even though he was taller he would let Blaine lead, more than happy to play the Ginger to his Fred, staring adoringly into those gorgeous golden-brown eyes as he tried to convey everything he felt at that very moment.  
  
Though, in his ideal world, they would both be singing. Singing a beautiful ballad from a musical of Blaine's choice as they got lost in each others' eyes and the audience got to just...witness it. See the perfection before them.  
  
Not that it would ever happen.  
  
He knew it couldn't. His chest literally ached with longing for it, for that  _moment_ , but it wasn't ever going to be an option. For one thing, that would require Blaine acknowledging having feelings for him and they weren't to that point yet. For all he knew, they wouldn't be to that point ever but he chose to be an optimist for once, to believe that Blaine did like him but just didn't want to say it yet. He couldn't do anything until he had confirmation, of course, but that wasn't the point.  
  
No, the point was that there was no way that the two of them, two  _boys_ , could get up there and show that.   
  
He hadn't know what he was for long, but he knew enough to get that it wasn't something he was allowed to shout from the rooftops. That he couldn't tell people. That he couldn't get up there and put himself - put  _them_  - on display like that. And even if he were willing to just...sing something a little less obvious in its expression, for some reason, if he found something else that expressed another aspect of how he felt for Blaine - deep friendship and connection and the way he felt less alone just standing near the boy...even if he could find something that would be equally genuine but less revealing, he still couldn't perform it.  
  
Because it would be obvious to every person who saw them just how he felt. He could conceal his emotions, his intentions, well enough when he was speaking. He could obscure his fears and frustrations better than most, with the years of practice he had. But there was no way of hiding how he felt when he sang. If anything, it came across as more intense than what he was actually feeling.  
  
He wondered if that was why there weren't usually duets at Dalton, because if there was a song between two boys, not only did it have to not be a love song in any way but it needed to convey nothing but friendship which was sadly the subject of very few songs. He could come up with exactly one such duet, and he doubted most of the Warblers would even know who Donald O'Connor was. And it was too easy to slip into a performance and just...lose one's self. Stop paying attention to the world around them and get lost in Blaine's smile and...  
  
It would be too risky. Too dangerous.  
  
 _I'll never know what made it so exciting  
Why all at once my heart took flight_  
  


> The two of them are actually dating, you know. My mom tried to ban all offstage couples from performing together because of the potential complications but

  
  
Of course he knew. Everyone with a brain knew. While he understood that she didn't always differentiate between performance and real life, she of all people - who had tried to use a solo to ensnare Finn's heart more than once - should be able to see how beautiful this was and just leave it alone instead of having to traipse on top of the moment with her insistence on showing she knew things. Kurt glared at the paper, and before he could even bring himself to care enough to finish the note he pressed it against the back of the chair and scrawled his reply.  
  


> We are not doing this now!

  
  
He thrust the note back over his shoulder without looking, glancing over just for a second to make sure Bobby had taken the note and it hadn't just fallen from between his fingers. Blaine looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh. "What?" he hissed.  
  
"Enjoying your girlfriend?" Blaine teased, and Kurt's eyes narrowed further...but Blaine was grinning so it was hard to actually be mad at him. That would require significant amounts of performance.  
  
 _I only know when he  
Began to dance with me  
I could have danced, danced, danced all night!_  
  
The boy dipped the girl between the second and third 'danced', pulling her back up and into his arms as she finished the song - they were both grinning and breathless, and Kurt noticed he gave her a little squeeze as the curtain rose and they moved to join the rest of the group for their main performance number.  
  
The next [song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozr-EItKGu8) was a sharp departure from the dance duet they'd just witnessed - upbeat with sharp, quick choreography and complex layered harmonies that almost outdid the Warblers. The contrast was almost jarring and, Kurt realized quickly, indicative of the group's biggest problem. The majority of them performed as Rachel said - technically perfect but with no emotion. Not that Ritchie Valens was a deep well of complex feelings, but they didn't even sound enthusiastic. There were smiles plastered on each and every face but no conviction behind them, as though they'd had drilled into them that they needed to smile while singing at all cost.  
  
There were a few exceptions: the pair who had performed in the opening, and two other girls. But their exuberance only served to emphasize the lack of excitement from the rest of their teammates, making them look more robotic and less like real people up there singing.  
  
Rachel's mother demanded perfection, demanded technical excellence, demanded hard work and dedication...but let everything else slip through the cracks. Ironically, not only was it the first number that was far more perfect, but - just like the four whose smiles beamed so brightly that it made their teammates seem like dull plastic in comparison - the quiet dance upstaged the show piece that was obviously intended to showcase the group's skill.  
  
While Kurt couldn't guarantee that it would be the group's undoing, he felt like it should have been obvious to everyone in the room. Of course, most people were still clapping along and seeming to enjoy themselves, so he had no idea if that would translate to a loss or not. Maybe they just didn't realize what they'd been watching and why the second half was lacking. Or maybe the first half would be like the icing on the technically-excellent cake. It was too early to tell.  
  
He did turn in his seat to catch Rachel's eye; when she looked at him, still looking hurt by the sharp tone his last note had taken, he gave her a small smile and nod to acknowledge that she had been right. She smirked, which made him roll his eyes, but it was back to being playful and was the most normal he'd felt since sitting down. The rest of the team may not have been here (though he thought Finn was probably in the audience somewhere with their parents), but eye-rolling and handicapping odds with Rachel did make things feel a little less strange.  
  
The Warblers exited the auditorium quickly and made their way backstage for the warmup - a series of quick but intense scales, harmonies, and pitch jumps that were designed to settle everyone down a little, get them into the groove they usually hit after an hour of rehearsing. Maybe it worked for everyone else; for Kurt, all it did was serve to remind him that he was definitely not at McKinley anymore.   
  
Warmups with his old group rarely actually included music. There was a lot of bonding in the green room before the performance, a lot of trying to get out whoever was fighting with whom and hash out any lingering problems. One time they'd learned an entirely new song on the bus ride over and spent their time in the green room trying to figure out choreography for the first time, which was never good when Brittany was the one trying to explain what to do and Finn was trying to dance. And it always worked - there was an adrenaline that kicked in, the frantic rush of trying to get everything in a row such that when it turned out even remotely okay everyone was thrilled with the outcome.  
  
This was different. This was months of practice to try to make difficult harmonies and jumps become second nature. And unlike his old team, one person screwing up was unlikely to bring down the whole team unless that person screwed up during a solo or ruined things so badly that everyone got distracted by the awfulness of it. That wouldn't be the case here - everyone was listening to everyone else and if one person slid or stuck out or, god forbid, hit the wrong note in the chord, it would throw off everyone else.  
  
Suddenly he felt like there was no way it wasn't going to be him. He was going to screw up the note - even though he'd never blown a note that he could remember in a competition setting. Or in an actual performance, or outside his shower a handful of times. But there was a first time for everything, and suddenly he was...okay, fine. He was nervous.  
  
He knew he shouldn't be - for one thing, it wasn't as though he had an actual solo. For another, worrying would only make it worse; he knew that. But he couldn't quite help it.  
  
Drawing in a deep breath, he stepped onto the risers with everyone else, concentrating as hard as he could. He heard the pitch pipe and found his note, trying to relax enough that he wouldn't ruin this.  
  
The [song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8PhP3yIlRw) had a lot of great harmonies to begin with and had been rearranged slightly to make up for the lack of percussion - plus they changed the hums to a more resonant 'oo' because it was a more pleasant sound from stage and allowed for much better blending. But for the most part, it wasn't too different.  
  
Focus. He just needed to concentrate.   
  
The beginning was easy - unison melody except for the couple basses and their "da-da-dum-bum" to replace the drums, then another eight-count phrase of two-part harmony with a little neck-swaying. It was during the third set of 32 that the song broke into full-on musical chaos, with the bass line picking up and the addition of the piano part and a third line of harmony on top of the melody - seven parts in total, split across fifteen guys, such that the only other person still singing Kurt's line was all the way across the stage in case he wanted to pick up the note from Kenny.  
  
He could do it just fine if he concentrated, listened to everyone...but then Blaine started to sing and it got all that much harder.  
  
 _Little bitty pretty one,  
C'mon and talk to me  
Lovey dovey lovey one,  
Come sit down on-a my knee_  
  
Kurt kept the tight smile plastered on, though it grew a little more genuine as he watched Blaine bop his way out to the front of the group. It was hard not getting distracted. By the time Blaine turned to him to sing the lyrics  _at him_ , he felt his entire body tighten and grin all at once, but muscle memory kept him on-pitch no matter how amazing Blaine's smile was when he sang.  
  
If anything, it made him want even more to get it right, to impress the boy, even though for one thing he knew Blaine wasn't exactly paying attention to him and only him and, even if he was, he wouldn't be impressed by Kurt doing exactly what his job was in that moment. But it was a little thing, made him feel less like he might slide into some strange minor key that wasn't intended.  
  
He missed a step on the start of the next 'Oh' section, moving to the right first instead of the left, and he glanced down at Blaine's feet for a moment to get himself back in-step. Glancing out to see if anyone noticed, he caught sight of Rachel in the audience. She was giving him an incredibly intense look, frustrated with him, and he knew he wasn't doing his best - he knew she'd seen him do better, but did she have to rub it in-  
  
She gave an exaggerated grin, mimicking the upturned curve with her fingertips, and mouthed 'smile!' at him. A pause, then another edict: 'Relax!'  
  
Okay, maybe she had a point.  
  
 _Tell you a story,  
Happened long time ago.  
Little, bitty, pretty one,  
I've been watchin' you grow._  
  
It was strange; he was on the verge of screwing up whenever he thought about it, but the second Blaine sang...  
  
It was like his brain was so busy staring at Blaine that he couldn't think about what notes to sing or what steps to take or when to start dancing across the stage with the rest of the group - because all he could think of was the way Blaine lit up when he was in front of an audience, and how much the audience loved him and he fed off that, how attractive Blaine was when he was hyped up on so much adrenaline...and his memory took over.  
  
Because he did know what he was doing. He'd managed to freak himself out to the point where he assumed he'd get things wrong, but he wasn't an idiot. He knew himself better than that.   
  
He relaxed a little more, glancing back at Blaine's head every so often to ensure he didn't start thinking too hard, and just kind of let himself...feel the music. Because when he stopped thinking about it and dissecting it and analyzing the eight different lines and where they diverged, he found eight different lines intertwining and playing off one another in ways he hadn't been able to hear when he was so busy learning it and committing it to memory.  
  
While it wasn't the same musical sensation he was used to, the catharsis of belting out a song to express his frustration or singing mournful ballads to try to excise some of the sadness he couldn't otherwise shake, while it was nowhere near the perfection of the duet earlier...it was beautiful. It was complex and strong and joyous in a way that almost made him feel happy himself. The reversal was strange - music feeding emotion instead of emotion feeding music - but he kind of reveled in it.  
  
 _Little, bitty, pretty one,  
Come on and talk-a to me.  
Lovey, dovey, lovey one,  
Come sit down on-a my knee_  
  
He glanced out at Rachel again as the song drew to a close, and she was grinning proudly, first on her feet when the applause began.  
  
Good. Because of all the people in that audience, he knew she knew what made a performance excellent.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The waiting was always the worst part of these competitions. Take a bunch of students who have just competed against each other, put them backstage and in a lobby with too much time to kill, and expect everything to go well despite the tension mounting with every passing minute.   
  
When he had been here last year, Kurt remembered, Puck had nearly caused a fistfight to break out when he flirted a little too enthusiastically with one of the girls from Carmel whose boyfriend happened to also be on the team. And a football rival who already hated both Puck  _and_  Finn. And easily three inches taller than Finn with significantly more muscle. Now he watched as boys who had been attending single-sex schools from approximately the age of forever tried to chat with girls who knew just enough of boys to know that these guys were not exactly the cream of the crop.  
  
"Ridiculous, isn't it?" Kurt mused to Blaine.  
  
"Hm?"   
  
"Watching them try. They have no chance at all, the girls look about as interested as they would be if Nick and Jeff suggested teaching them how to feed pigs - which I suppose isn't so different from most of their dating lives - but they keep thinking if they just grin bigger, they'll get what they want. I've spent enough time to know what girls like, and whatever  _that_  is, is not on the list."  
  
Blaine shifted nervously. Kurt still didn't understand it, did he? He seemed to know just enough to know not to start telling everyone he saw that he was sick, but he didn't make any effort to hide it - unless one counted the pseudo-relationship with Rachel. He didn't count it if only because Kurt had been doing his level best to avoid his "girlfriend" the entire afternoon, which kind of went against the entire point of having a girl that he could claim.  
  
If he wasn't going to pointedly, proudly display his relationship with Rachel, how did it serve him? If he had no interest in girls as anything other than a friend, as he appeared to want to state emphatically for all the world to hear, then wasn't the sole purpose of the relationship to prevent people from knowing about what he was? A coping mechanism designed to deflect questions and put suspicions to rest.  
  
After all, Kurt didn't actually seem invested in the relationship - not like he would be. He would be trying to make it work however he could so that he could feel satisfied even with the knowledge of the disgusting thoughts that lurked in the back of his mind.   
  
Maybe Kurt had given up already on the idea. He desperately hoped not - Kurt should give it another try. They both should. Hell, they all should - Kurt, himself, his father's 'difficult cases'...maybe if they all just tried hard enough-  
  
Looking like he was trying too hard would be more normal than giving up the ghost, giving in to the urges, let alone  _acting_  on them.  
  
He wondered if Kurt knew the consequences of his feelings. If he had any idea that this wasn't something natural or healthy, that it was going to destroy him from the inside out like a growing, crushing tumor, leaving a miserable shell in its wake. Maybe he thought all of this was okay, was halfway  _normal_.  
  
Blaine didn't want to have to be the one to burst his bubble. He remembered how terrified he'd been when he found out he might be...sick. Before he realized that he could keep himself healthy if he just worked hard enough. He hadn't been able to jam the sharp-pronged pin into Kurt's chest the night before, but this might be an easier... _gentler_  way of helping.  
  
"Kurt. You should watch how you talk about stuff like that, you know?"  
  
Kurt's head turned quickly, eyes narrowing. "What 'stuff' is that?" he asked suspiciously.  
  
Blaine's voice dropped low as he explained, "About...how you feel," he offered vaguely. "You need to be careful. About people knowing. It's not-...it's not the kind of thing you should go around letting people know."  
  
Right, Kurt thought bitterly. Because he was really telling everyone he saw. He wanted to practically ask everyone at Dalton door-to-door but was  _refraining_  because he was concerned about what might happen. He wanted to keep chipping away at the feeling like there was an anvil sitting on his chest, and each time someone knew (all two of them), that feeling got just the tiniest bit lighter. "I haven't said a word."  
  
"Except to Rachel. And to me. And to who else? When you talk about being like the girls instead of being like one of the boys who's trying to attract a girl, it starts sounding like..."  
  
"Like what?" Kurt asked defiantly, his voice low. "Like...I am who I am? Like there's something wrong with me?"  
  
"There is-" Blaine cut himself off as the lead singer from Crawford approached, skirt swinging as she walked. "Hello," he offered, pasting on a bright smile and hoping desperately she hadn't heard the first part of the conversation.  
  
"Hi," she replied with a smile that seemed a little more skeptical of his charming grin than not. "You were really great."  
  
"So were you," he replied sincerely. Her eyes were a mix of blue and green, a trait he found immediately attractive in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on. He extended his hand and introduced himself. "Blaine Anderson."  
  
"Jean Hartford," she replied. "I was thinking, we should get the two groups together."  
  
"Really? I was thinking the exact same thing." How funny that she'd thought of it too. He wondered if any of the other Warblers had considered it - or if they would want to do it for any reason other than the potential to stare at girls all day.   
  
He was supposed to want to stare at girls, too, he reminded himself sternly. Because part of the problem was that he hadn't been trying hard enough, so if he was exposed to them more...spent more time around them...that could only help. Maybe his problem had been a lack of other options and a teenage hormone-fueled sexual frenzy.  
  
"Guess that means it's fate," she replied with a coy grin. She handed him a folded piece of paper.  
  
"What's this?"  
  
"My number. Curfew's at nine, but any time before that."  
  
Kurt regarded her skeptically out of the corner of narrowed eyes. This girl was asking Blaine out - he knew very few of the signs when it came to boys, but he'd seen enough girls talk about boys they liked... _she_  was asking  _him_  out? Forget the part where she was so unapologetically forward that she was giving Sandy Lopez a run for her money - what girl gave out her phone number to a boy without prompting anyway? Talk about either egotistical or desperate. But of all the people she was asking out, she was asking out a boy who was in absolutely no position to return her advances.   
  
And get Blaine was smiling and telling her he appreciated her boldness and sass, saying he would call her sometime the week in the hopes of setting something up or getting together? Was he out of his mind?  
  
Rachel walked over with a bright smile and placed her hand on his shoulder. "While everyone's waiting, I want you to come with me. You were really were extraordinary up there, even if you did spend the entire first half way too tense. Are you-" She suddenly noticed Jean's presence and turned to face her a little more. "Oh. Hello," she said in her best 'I'm being nice to my competition' voice that Kurt recognized from many years of watching her audition for things. "You have a great stage presence," she stated.  
  
"Thank you," Jean replied.  
  
"If I may say-"  
  
"No, you may not," Kurt cut her off, though he wasn't entirely sure why considering he wasn't particularly wild about this girl already.  
  
Blaine chuckled. "Jean, this is Rachel. Kurt's girlfriend," he explained, but the look he gave Kurt on the word 'girlfriend,' the way he emphasized it...  
  
He hoped Kurt got the point. That he understood.  
  
This was how they were supposed to be. What they were supposed to be accomplishing. The ultimate goal.  
  
Kurt started to open his mouth, but Rachel cut him off this time. "Kurt, I want to introduce you to my mom."  
  
"I've known your mother literally since before I was in first grade," he stated flatly.  
  
"I know that - silly," she added with a roll of her eyes in Jean's direction, as though they were sharing a private joke; from the look on Jean's face, it was obvious that they weren't.   
  
Great, Kurt thought, now Rachel was getting in on the act, playing up their relationship at Blaine's insistence. He was going to kill them both. Instead he plastered on a ridiculous tight smile.  
  
"But with you away at school, I haven't gotten to introduce you to her as my boyfriend yet." She turned to Jean again and added, "We've only been dating for three weeks this coming Monday, but we've known each other almost our whole lives." She laced her arm through Kurt's, resting her hand just below his elbow, and added, "Come along darling."  
  
If this was Rachel's idea of subtle 'appearance only' dating, they were going to have some serious issues.   
  
"Yes, dear." He forced the sarcastic reply through his teeth, the same smile still screwed onto his face. "Lead the way."  
  
He just hoped how bad the past few minutes had gone were not in any way a reflection on what kind of scores they were getting, because that would be atrocious.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The atmosphere in the car was silent, stony. Rachel stared out the windshield as the wipers attempted to push away the freezing rain before it could turn to slush on the glass. Her mother hadn't even turned on the radio, and that was  _always_  on when they were driving somewhere. She had learned from a very young age the importance of being able to sing anything at a moment's notice, and practicing to a variety of radio stations was an important exercise in that pursuit.  
  
"You must be taking the loss really hard," she offered. Her mother was not a woman accustomed to coming in second place...and even if she was happy for Kurt and the Warblers, she was extremely competitive. Her mother was a model for her, an extension of herself in a way due to their incredibly close relationship growing up as the daughter of a strong working single mother, so her mother's wins were her wins too and her mother's losses were her losses.   
  
"It's not about that."  
  
"I maintain that we had the strongest vocal performance - the harmonies were the most layered, the most perfect. But the Warblers had a spirit-"  
  
"Rachel. It's not about that." Her mother's hands tightened on the wheel, and it was obvious that she was being serious rather than merely deflecting the conversation out of a desire to avoid it.   
  
"Then why do you seem so angry?" Rachel asked quietly.  
  
"I don't want you dating that boy."  
  
"Kurt?" she asked, confused. "But you like Kurt - and you've known him forever, I don't understand why-"  
  
"Because I said so," her mother replied firmly. "Because I-...look, sweetie, I know you want a boyfriend. Believe me, no one understands that better than I do," she added, and Rachel smiled faintly - her mother hadn't had any dates in awhile, at least not that she knew of. There were a few she wasn't supposed to know about, she guessed by the way it was never brought up again, but she wasn't going to mention those. "Men find women like us intimidating - and finding a boy in high school who can appreciate your talent and isn't threatened by your ambition is difficult, I know. But you have no idea what complications come from dating a...boy like Kurt."  
  
"Mom, it's okay-"  
  
"It's not." She sighed and shook her head. "You don't get it yet-"  
  
"You're just angry over the divorce," Rachel stated, then added, "I know why he left, and I know about Kurt, too. It's okay."  
  
"What do you mean, you know?"  
  
They'd been dancing around this conversation since it happened, and the last thing Rachel had been planning on was to have it in the car on the way back from a competition she wasn't even allowed to perform in. As if it hadn't been frustrating enough to have to watch other people sing songs all day, songs that were much better suited for her vocal range and tone quality, now she had to try to explain to her mother what she knew without making it sound like she blamed her mother for hiding it in the first place.  
  
She'd meant to say something earlier, to ask questions, to  _something_ , but her mother had seemed bitter about it for  _so_  long and she didn't want to hurt her...  
  
"I've known for awhile."  
  
"How long? Did he tell you? He's not supposed to- I'll take him back to court-"  
  
"He didn't say anything," she stated honestly. "He lives in a two-bedroom house, and when I go there his roommate stays on the couch. I take Leroy's room, but the only clothes in the closet are out of season and old coats he's had longer than I've been alive. He's not very good at hiding things. I know about them."  
  
"How long did you..."  
  
"The year I was twelve, when I went for Chanukkah."  
  
The statement weighed heavily in the air for a few minutes - she'd known for five years, nearly six, and never said a word.  
  
When neither of them spoke, Rachel added, "Kurt and I...I know what I'm getting into. It won't be like you and Dad - he was a surprise. This is different. He won't tie me down, trap me here. Not like you. I know what you wanted, where you wanted to be, and then you met Dad and got married and I was born...and here you are. I-I know this isn't your dream," she aded more quietly. "Kurt isn't threatened by me - my brilliance or my talent. He and I are moving to New York when we graduate next year - it's what we both want. We understand that about each other."  
  
After all, it was all about the understanding.  
  
"Also," she said, now that the conversation was started, "I want to see him more often."  
  
"Kurt?"  
  
"Dad. I-I know you have sole custody and you let me see him as a courtesy once a year, but I want to see him more."  
  
"It's more complicated than that."  
  
"Not in six months when I turn 18," she pointed out. The request was more of a courtesy than the visits had been.  
  
Maybe she would take Kurt over there sometime, she thought. After all, he constantly seemed to have questions and, as much as she enjoyed answering them, there were times she had no idea. Watching two guys who pretended not to ever touch each other eat dinner across the table from her wasn't really the same as asking how to tell who else was a homosexual or not.   
  
Besides - even if they were fake-dating, they were still dating. and she wanted to introduce her dad to her boyfriend.


	16. Chapter 16

Blaine stared at the stack of application packets on his desk with thinly-veiled contempt.  
  
He knew that it was partly his own fault, having so many to fill out. Most of his classmates had to only complete one - their first-choice school, almost guaranteed to be where their father had gone, where a spot was practically reserved for them already by virtue of their name alone. Possibly a second application if they wanted something safe, fun, a potential leveraging point, or maybe if their father had multiple degrees. There were several of those at Dalton, and he was among them.   
  
This was supposed to be easy. He had done everything right. He was attending a fantastic, well-known preparatory school with high grades; he would graduate with honours in June, he knew already, and he had a substantial and varied list of extracurriculars.   
  
Getting in wasn't the problem, he concluded without sounding overly confident. Deciding what he wanted - that was the rub.  
  
Because it wasn't as simple as just sending them all in. If he got back a letter of acceptance from some of these programs, he would have a very hard time turning it down, and not only because saying "No" to Yale was just crazy. But if his father found out he'd been accepted to Yale - which he inevitably would because he had an entire network of Eli's he could ask about these things - and turned it down for anything other than his other alma mater, Princeton?  
  
Blaine honestly wasn't sure what would happen then. He knew it wouldn't be good. He knew there would be a long lecture expounding on all the ways he was disappointing the family and bringing dishonour to his father with his ungratefulness. He knew there would be an argument about it during which he might actually see his father display some sort of human emotion - and even if that emotion was anger, he almost wanted to see that. He wondered if his father would be one of those slow burn types or the kind who exploded then immediately pulled back. If there would be a vein popping out of his neck or forehead somewhere that Blaine had never seen because they kept everything so forcibly even at home. If he would be the type to slap his ungrateful son, like many of his friends' fathers would, or if it would be far more seething with a turn and a storm away, all clenched fists that never flew.  
  
He wasn't sure why he found himself almost wanting to know. He wasn't that boy, he wasn't the one who enjoyed making trouble for his parents - not like Logan, who took pride in every time his parents got called into the Headmaster's office, or Christopher who seemed to take delight in every time he could get his father to lose his temper. Blaine had never been someone who enjoyed toeing the line; he was happy to stay far back from it...except when it came to things like this. When it came to this, when it came to performing, when it came to not wanting to deny the things that he cared about - narrow as they may be - he went beyond the mere surly, bitter insults he came up with during a silent dinner.   
  
He almost wanted to actively defy them. To purposefully pick somewhere they had never heard of so he could stop trying to belnd into his father's shadow and just...  
  
...Just  _what_?  
  
That was where he always got stuck. Because after he told his father he wasn't going to Yale - or to Princeton, or even to Harvard which his father would have hated but would be better than this kind of thing....after the fight and the metaphorical kicking and screaming...then what happened? Then did he go to some other school and try to strike out on his own with no support? Assume that whatever money was in his trust (and he knew it was a sizable sum by now) would cover whatever he needed for tuition and he could make up the rest? Put off school until he could save enough on his own?   
  
Or would he be shoved into therapy and given a host of drugs to make sure he never spoke out again, the way his mother had? Did he become the next Anderson robot, smiling absently at people without realizing they were even there?   
  
And all of that was without the more barbaric treatments for his more disgusting condition. All of that, all of the fake niceness and mechanical social scene that wouldn't allow him to express an honest emotion ever again, that was standard. That was what most adults became anyway, some just faster and less naturally than others. That was what everyone turned into someday, and putting it off was like trying to postpone puberty because he didn't want his voice to change: impossible. In fact, he would probably be heading down that path at whichever elite school he might select, anyway. But the other therapies-  
  
He didn't need those yet, he reminded himself as he picked the top application from the stack and began to fill in his name and vital statistics without paying much attention. Not as long as he kept himself in check. Besides, that would require someone knowing.  
  
Well, someone other than Kurt.  
  
Still, the question remained unanswered, he concluded as he stared at the application to Columbia in front of him. If he told his father he wasn't going to one of the Ivy League schools he would have preferred but was going somewhere else instead, what would happen?  
  
A part of him desperately wanted to know, to see the look of shock on his father's face - to see if his mother was even capable of being surprised by anything anymore. But the majority of him didn't want to think about it. Didn't want to contemplate it. It was too...too risky.   
  
Some rules existed for a reason. Some edicts had a purpose behind them and needed to be followed because the alternative was far worse.   
  
For a fleeting moment, he wondered if any of the adults he knew had felt like this when they were his age, had wanted to tell their fathers with all their expectations and the burdens of impending disappointment to leave them alone, to go away and let them live their own lives. If any of them had struck out into the great unknown by themselves and what had become of it.  
  
Obviously not much, he reasoned, if he knew the person. Not when everyone he knew was so monolithic, uniform.  
  
Even if he wanted to break that - and he wasn't sure he did ...he wasn't sure that he  _could_ , not as predestined as everything around him seemed.  
  
He glanced from the Yale application on the top of the pile to the Columbia on in front of him, then back again. For now...for now he should just fill them all out, he concluded. It would buy him time to figure out what he wanted.   
  
He was exhausted already and wasn't even a full page in. He hadn't gotten to anything more taxing than his parents' date of birth and his head already ached.   
  
There was plenty of time to do this later. For now, he concluded, he needed to do something fun. Something expressive. Something that would make him feel less like he was destined to grow up to be his father, wearing an expensive suit and either a forced, disinterested smile or no expression at all. Shoving himself out of his chair, he sifted through his albums until he found the one he needed and carried it out of the room.  
  
He found Kurt in the Commons, which was ideal. Kurt sat at the table over near the fireplace, bent over a textbook and looking bored out of his mind: all precisely what he needed in a willing victim. After all, if he was going to blow off things he should be doing, he should at least pretend to be doing it because he had other, more time-sensitive things he needed to be doing. And he did: the song needed to be ready in a week, and with everyone gearing up for pre-break projects and quizzes, it might be hard to track Kurt down any other time.  
  
"Hey," he offered with a smile that seemed to come out of nowhere.   
  
Kurt looked up in surprise at the intrusion, then relaxed a little and returned the smile tightly. "You scared me."  
  
"Well, good, because I'm actually Marley's ghost, and I'm here to tell you to stop studying so hard." He eyed the book open on the table, Kurt's notebook beside it, and hoped desperately Kurt would agree to be irresponsible with him just this once. Just long enough that he could stop feeling so...penned-in by everything he was meant to become one day and allowed to be a little freer and a lot more emotive.  
  
He just needed five minutes. Five minutes of singing a song he needed to be rehearsing anyway. It was perfect.  
  
Kurt rolled his eyes a little, then looked suspicious. "What's the album?"  
  
"I need you to help me practice something."  
  
Kurt looked intrigued, sitting up a little straighter as he crossed his legs and laced his fingers over the kneecap. "Do tell."  
  
"I'm singing a duet in the Columbus Historical Society's annual Christmas Showcase."  
  
"Are you wearing the costume from the initiation?" Kurt asked. "I'm sure it would be a crowd pleaser."  
  
The last thing he wanted to think about - even after the stack of applications waiting on his desk and well below any possible studying he could be doing at that moment - was that evening. The way they just kept staring at each other and how much of a coward he was that he couldn't help his friend who needed him. Of how desperately he had wanted to touch Kurt's neck and see if it was as soft as it looked. Of how glad he'd been that his jacket was as long as it was.  
  
Surely there had to be something he could think about that fell between all of the things he was expected but didn't want, and the things he didn't want to want but seemed to anyway.  
  
He laughed nervously and replied, "No. No, I think it's some sort of 1940s garb, possibly war-era - I suggested an Andrews Sisters kind of a thing for Jean and she seems to be pushing the organizers for that now."  
  
Kurt's smile faltered, grew stiffer.  _Jean_. The name had been coming up a lot since Sectionals, and he hated it every time. Jean, the convenient, unknowing potential girlfriend that Blaine was stringing along even though he knew he was a homosexual. Not that the two of them had actually gotten that far, as much as Kurt could tell, even if Blaine wasn't nearly as open with him now as he had been earlier in the fall. "Ah," he replied. "She would make a very good Patty."  
  
"That's what I thought," Blaine replied proudly. "But I need your help. I haven't sung with anyone as a duet in awhile, usually when I sing it's either me with the Warblers backing me up, or just me with the radio or the record player. And I haven't sung with someone  _above_  me in..." He thought a moment. He'd last attended a co-ed school when he was 12 and his voice hadn't dropped yet. "Ever, actually," he amended. "So I thought that you could sing the girl part, help me get used to it."  
  
Kurt hesitated, then wondered why. Why in the world was he turning down a chance to sing with Blaine? The boy was amazingly talented and completely entrancing when he sang, and they hadn't really gotten a chance to do anything together. Aside from occasionally both singing along to the same verse when they laid on Blaine's floor and listened to soundtracks, they hadn't done any singing just the two of them. In fact, Blaine had barely heard him sing at all, which was just a travesty; for one thing, he was incredibly proud of his voice. For another, if he wanted any chance of getting a solo or even a prominent line, he needed to impress people in charge, and Blaine was the ultimate de facto leader. If Blaine liked singing with him, it could lead to a lot more duets for him in the future.  
  
And he kind of adored the way Blaine lit up when he sang. Who was he to turn that down?  
  
"What song is it?"  
  
"'Baby It's Cold Outside,'" Blaine reported, turning the album so he could see the cover.   
  
"A personal favourite," Kurt offered, and it was. He loved the original with Esther WIlliams, even if he did like the Dinah Shore a little bit better.  
  
"Me, too," Blaine replied as he walked over to the record player in the corner, [put it on](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgdLdl60EMA), and half-danced back over toward Kurt.  
  
 _I really can't stay-_  
  
"Wait," Blaine said, stopping before he could sing his own line. "That's the wrong octave."  
  
"What are you talking about?"  
  
"You're singing in the same octave as me, the entire point was that you have the highest voice in the group-"  
  
"Okay, first of all, Bill's is technically higher. And second of all, what does it matter?"  
  
"I'm not used to singing with girls, I need to get used to it."  
  
Kurt wondered if Blaine realized how that sounded, how intentional it made everything seem. "So it's just this song, then? This duet's the problem?"  
  
Blaine looked at Kurt curiously, confused. "I don't want to make a fool of myself. Okay, an even bigger fool of myself," he added, since he was certain that whatever he was wearing would be ridiculous even if it were meant to just be a showier interpretation of a military uniform. "Please, could you just-"  
  
Kurt wanted to say no. But the earnest look on Blaine's face was so-...  
  
He nodded and managed to keep himself from rolling his eyes. "Okay." Blaine's grin as he moved over to reset the needle was worth it.  
  
Almost.  
  
 _I really can't stay_  
But baby it's cold outside  
 _I've got to go away_  
But baby it's cold outside  
  
The thing was, it wasn't just that the higher octave wasn't in the comfortable part of his range. It would have been three years ago, when he could out-soprano any soprano in town. But now that his voice had settled into something a little closer to a male range - at least by operatic standards where his status as a countertenor was firmly cemented - the octave above Blaine's voice felt strained. Forced.  
  
And feminine.  
  
That wasn't something he minded generally, he'd gotten more than used to being called girly. He had always preferred the company of girls to the boys, especially as he got older. But the way Blaine had prodded it made him feel awkward, like some kind of stand-in. A substitute for what Blaine thought he really wanted.  
  
He didn't want to sing a song with Blaine as the closest thing Blaine could find to a girl. He didn't want Blaine to see him like that, it was-...it wasn't real. He didn't want to put on a skirt and a wig and pretend to be the girl like in a Shakespearean production, where the youngest and most feminine boy became the object of men's affections because they could pretend he wasn't really a boy at all. He wanted to stand on a stage with Blaine and sing songs together with each of them as  _them_ , as artists and-  
  
And more, if he was being honest, but he couldn't let himself go there right now. Not when Blaine was trying to make him...whatever this was. Because he was staring at Blaine and unable to tear his gaze away from the grinning, flirtatious boy while Blaine pictured him as some kind of strange brunette Jean he'd make do with until he got to see the girl he really wanted to perform with.  
  
 _This evening has been so very nice..._  
  
Kurt cursed his wistfulness as he sang the line. Did he want to give away every feeling he ever had? He knew what his complexion did as soon as he even considered being interested or emotional in any way - he knew better. He knew how to mask things better. Why wasn't he trying harder?  
  
Why couldn't he just try a little harder to not show he felt this way? Why couldn't he try harder and not feel it at all?  
  
I'll hold your hands - they're just like ice.  
  
With a charming smile, Blaine reached down and touched the back of the hand resting on Kurt's knee, and Kurt's stomach gave a little surge of excitement. If he was powerless over Blaine's smile and voice, then he was doomed by Blaine's touch and just knew beyond a doubt he would do something stupid if it kept happening.  
  
If Blaine...wanted a girl, then he...then he wanted a girl, and Kurt was going to have to accept that fact. If Blaine was happy with his- with  _Jean_  and wanted to sing and dance with girls now, no matter how he'd felt in the past, then that...that wasn't something he could change and definitely not something they could talk about.  
  
Kurt shoved himself out of the chair, clasping his hands behind his back as he walked across the room. He needed to get away from Blaine and his stupid grin and his broad, strong hands with their tender touch or he was going to lose his mind and do something really,  _really_  stupid. Something like he had wanted to do in the initiation had there not been two dozen other boys around.  
  
He'd thought he had a chance for sure then; now he wasn't so certain. It was just all so murky, and every time he tried to bring up the topic of liking boys, Blaine shut him down. But he wasn't sure what that meant, either - did Blaine not want to talk about it because he found it disgusting? Or because he felt something and simply didn't want anyone else to know?  
  
 _My mother will start to worry_  
Beautiful, what's your hurry?  
  
He almost let out a sigh at hearing the word 'beautiful' fall from Blaine's lips in his direction before reminding himself that it was only a lyric, and that if Blaine really meant it he meant it only inasmuch as he thought the girl Kurt was playing was beautiful. But really it was just a lyric.  
  
 _My father will be pacing the floor_  
Listen to the fireplace roar  
 _So really I better scurry_  
  
He looked back at Blaine and found the boy staring at him with a pleading expression that felt so genuine. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to pretend it meant something, and that Blaine really did want-  
  
It was a song, he reminded himself. Nothing more. And his tendency to overanalyze things until he created hope that wasn't there had been a longstanding problem that led to nothing but disappointment his entire life.   
  
Beautiful, please don't hurry  
 _But maybe just half a drink more_  
Put some records on while I pour  
  
It wasn't fair, Blaine thought frustratedly, how easy it was for music to manipulate emotions.  
  
He'd always considered the two to go hand-in-hand. He sang to get out whatever he was feeling, to exorcise any demons that were lurking and release every pent-up annoyance and feeling of anger contained within him. He sang to keep himself from shouting joyous news from the rooftops and to, on a few occasions, express the kind of deep sorrow that defied any words or description other than the slow build and whispered ebb of a great ballad.  
  
But sometimes the music was what made him feel a certain way, instead of his emotions serving as the starting point for song selection. Sometimes if he was in a bad mood and he put on an upbeat song it made him feel better. A few times he'd ruined a perfectly good day by putting on something depressing.   
  
And right now, he had a song making him downright flirty.  
  
He didn't want to be. He didn't feel that way. He didn't genuinely want to chase Kurt around the room playfully...except when the song was on, when he sang the lyrics, he felt this overwhelming urge to just act it all out. To let the barely-restrained, thinly-veiled game of tag on the record play itself out over the expanse of the Commons.  
  
But then what? he wondered.  
  
 _The neighbours might think_  
Baby it's bad out there  
  
Kurt twirled past Blaine, circling his way over to the arm of the leather sofa. He perched and watched as Blaine spun then took up residence across from him.  
  
Blaine kept staring at him.  
  
He was Blaine's spot when he twirled, and then his eyes just kept boring into Kurt, like he physically couldn't bring himself to look away.  
  
That didn't make any sense, Kurt reminded himself. Because if the idea of not being able to look away was one of the signs that a person was interested in the person singing - if that was why he was afraid to be caught staring at Blaine when he performed-  
  
Was this-  
  
No. That couldn't be it.   
  
Could it?  
  
 _Say what's in this drink?_  
No cabs to be had out there  
  
The earnest expression seemed oddly less overtly lovestruck than the previous one, despite Blaine insisting so plaintively that he stay. But the boy's eyes never moved from him - whenever he glanced down or away or otherwise forced his gaze off of the lead Warbler, Kurt looked back to find Blaine's eyes still locked firmly on him.  
  
Blaine couldn't stop staring at him.  
  
The thought seemed like it should be illuminated in the neon lights of a Broadway marquis in his brain for how much his heart leapt at the realization. The boy he liked, whom he could barely stop looking at (and even then only because it had been a few months' worth of practicing and he'd trained himself to be able to, at the very least, perform the necessary choreography without keeping his eyes on Blaine at all times) couldn't stop looking at him.  
  
That meant they both felt this. That it wasn't something unrequited - that Blaine  _was in love with him too_.  
  
He felt dizzy, like he wanted to jump up on top of a couch and squeal with glee, hands clapped together. Blaine was in love with him. He had to be. That was why he kept staring. Blaine liked him -  _more than liked him!_  - and that meant Blaine was pursuing him. Musically, of course, how they communicated anything important.   
  
 _I wish I knew how_  
Your eyes are like starlight now  
 _to break this spell_  
  
He didn't, honestly. He never wanted the spell to  _end_ , the two of them staring at each other as Blaine looked dreamily into his eyes- Kurt's breath hitched a little between his lines, not enough that Blaine probably noticed.   
  
The moment was intense, heavy with a look no one had ever given him. Like the idea of having to not see his eyes was making Blaine miserable. Like he wanted to stay in the spell forever, too, and would hate when it ended.  
  
He stood, walking around the back of the couch, glancing back at Blaine in a test. He needed to see if this really was what he thought - if Blaine still couldn't take his eyes away, let alone followed, that would be his sign. If he broke the moment, as much as he hated it to, and the boy he liked still followed, that had to mean something.  
  
I'll take your hat - your hair looks swell  
  
It was his goddamned eyes.  
  
Everything else he could get past, but the  _eyes_ , with their mix of blue and green and grey and the way they lit up when Kurt sang?  
  
But that didn't mean anything. Not about that. Not about his condition and whether he was getting worse.  
  
After all, everyone had eyes. It wasn't like he was fixated on Kurt's long, lean legs or his thin torso or the very faint shadow lurking under his porcelain complexion. Everyone had eyes, a lot of girls had really pretty ones and if he could just find someone more appropriate with the same...whatever it was that made him want to just stare at Kurt's forever...  
  
Besides. The only reason he was finding Kurt this attractive right now was because he was picturing him with bobbed hair in a Andrews Sisters-esque faux uniform. Maybe trimmed with sequins because Kurt would like that. That was why he couldn't stop looking.  
  
If Kurt were a girl, this would be fine. But Kurt wasn't, even with that voice of his, so he just needed to find a girl with a lot of the qualities he liked about Kurt. After all, he was more like a girl than not, wasn't he? It shouldn't be such a tall order.  
  
Except it was.   
  
Because he'd seen girls with beautiful eyes before but none of them made him feel like this. And Rachel was interested in all the same things he and Kurt talked about, but he didn't find himself staring at her. And Jean could be bitingly sarcastic sometimes in a way he found incredibly endearing in Kurt but it wasn't the same. It wasn't the same rush when he saw them that he got when he saw this boy in front of him.  
  
And he hated that. Hated  _him_  for not being-  
  
Hated himself more though. Especially as he followed Kurt around the back of the couch to sit beside him, his stomach fluttering as he playfully bumped Kurt's shoulder.  
  
 _I ought to say no, no, no sir_  
Mind if I move in closer?  
  
Why wasn't he stronger?  
  
Other boys, they could feel this way and make it stop. They could feel this way about someone and ignore it, or shove it aside, or stop it entirely. There were people who stopped feeling this way through sheer force of will...and he used to be one of them.  
  
But now Kurt was here and smiling and he couldn't-  
  
 _At least I'm gonna say that I tried_  
  
Kurt could barely restrain the ecstatic grin that threatened to spill onto his face when Blaine followed him. He was right. He was completely, one hundred percent right about what Blaine wanted and how he felt.   
  
He could barely remember to breathe and kept almost forgetting the words because all he could think about was Blaine smile and the fact that it was  _for him_. All of this, it wasn't just a song that was naturally flirty, it was for  _him_ , because Blaine  _liked him_ , the way he had liked Blaine for months now.  
  
And that meant there was no point in hiding how he felt anymore. He didn't have to watch how he looked when Blaine was in the room, at least not as long as it was just the two of them.. He didn't have to pretend he didn't want to just lean over and touch him and kiss him and be near him.  
  
He could stop being restrained. He could do what he felt.  
  
The knowledge alone felt like an enormous burden had been lifted, as if the wall separating them was suddenly made of flimsy paper instead of thick stone and he'd been handed a sharp knife to cut it down. If he'd thought that the conversation on the way back from Lima months ago had felt good, knowing that he wasn't the only one who felt the way that he did? This felt a million times better because not only was he not alone, but he could be  _with_  someone.  
  
What's the sense in hurting my pride?  
 _I really can't stay_  
Baby don't hold out  
 _Oh but it's cold outside_  
  
Blaine tore his eyes away from Kurt as he moved to the piano bench and reached past him to play a few bars of the interlude with his right hand; his left hand skimmed awkwardly against Kurt's sleeve. He pulled it back quickly, unnerved by the overwhelming urge to reach out and grab Kurt's arm, and scurried a safe distance to the fireplace...but his gaze returned to where it had been, locked firmly on Kurt in a way that was starting to feel like it bordered on truly psychotic instead of merely the manifestation of a psychosexual perversion.  
  
Kurt stood smoothly with a polished grace and strode to lean against the mantle not far from Blaine. His voice settled into its more natural octave, sounding far better against Blaine's than it had in the strained falsetto; he wondered if Blaine would correct him, try to start the song over again in an effort to make him into something other than this.   
  
 _I've got to get home_  
  
The sound of Kurt's voice overlapping with his But baby you'll freeze out there was jarring, suddenly masculine and equal instead of what the dynamic had been, and Blaine tried not to react. He wanted to; he wanted to tell Kurt to put things back the way they had been, to change it all back and make this less- Less  _awful_. Less wrong.  
  
Boys didn't sing duets together. Certainly not like this. Not staring at each other and flirting and  _wanting_ , and if Kurt could just be the girl again he could stop this horrible burning ache in his gut and the desperate need a little lower and just-...he could feel normal if Kurt was someone else right now. If Kurt were anyone else, he wouldn't feel like this.  
  
That was part of the problem.  
  
 _Say, lend me a coat_  
It's up to your knees up there  
 _You've really been grand_  
  
Kurt walked past him, brushing their shoulders together with a sly grin as he ran his hand slowly along the length of Blaine's arm. He'd never felt like this before, more Betty Garrett than Esther Williams, and it was invigorating. It made him bold - assertive in a way he wasn't used to, but it added to the heady mix of adrenaline and musical power and confidence and giddiness in the knowledge that Blaine couldn't stop looking at him. He peeled off toward the couch, able to  _feel_  Blaine's eyes on him and unable to stop smiling.  
  
I thrill when you touch my hand  
 _But don't you see?_  
  
Blaine didn't know what was wrong with him.  
  
Well - okay. He knew what was really wrong with him, what the underlying problem in all of this was, without which none of this would be happening. He was all too well aware of that as he watched Kurt sashay his way around that damned couch looking so- so-  _incredible_  that he couldn't help himself.  
  
But why couldn't he help himself? He'd been succeeding for years. He'd kept himself from feeling this intensely about anyone even with songs involved, but something about Kurt just-  
  
He wanted to cry. He wanted to run from the room as fast as his legs could carry him. He wanted to shove Kurt down and away and tell him to leave him the hell alone and stop being so beautiful. He wanted to go do painful things to himself to try and bring back the association between this feeling right here and physical agony because apparently the link between this feeling and emotional anguish wasn't enough to stop him.  
  
But none of those were as much as he  _wanted_  Kurt.  
  
As if pulled by magnets, he walked slowly around to the other side of the couch, dropping to his knees on the seat.  
  
How can you do this thing to me?  
  
Kurt noted that Blaine followed him, almost euphoric as he sang his warning. Blaine's last chance to back out, to step back, to look away-  
  
 _There's bound to be talk tomorrow...at least there will be plenty implied..._  
  
Blaine didn't move away, almost leaning toward him as he sang If you got pneumonia and died with this little pout like he would be so sad if that happened but not as sad as if Kurt left right now.  
  
No way in the world was Kurt leaving right now. Not with those gorgeous light brown eyes staring into his, with the two of them singing so close that he could feel when Blaine inhaled. The smell of his aftershave was almost overpowering at this distance, and though the scent of shampoo and hair product wasn't quite as intense when it wasn't his own on Blaine, its unfamiliarity was intriguing.   
  
He knew what Blaine looked like and had spent more than his share of time committing every memory of the handsome boy to memory over the past few months. What he sounded like was the stuff of dreams - literally. But with the knowledge of what Blaine smelled like imprinting itself on his memory over a series of song lyrics, Kurt was suddenly struck by the intense desire to know what Blaine felt like.  
  
Tasted like.  
  
 _I really can't stay_  he murmured more than sang, leaning more heavily on the back of the couch. Blaine didn't move back, just kept staring at him like he was something entrancing and lovely, and he just-  
  
He couldn't help himself. He'd been holding himself back for more than three months now - closer to four if he counted the first time they met and how much he had wanted to just be near Blaine from that instant, and now that he knew how Blaine felt about him...  
  
Shifting forward to rest more weight on his hips against the back of the couch, Kurt leaned in and pressed his lips against Blaine's. They were a little chapped from the winter cold but not badly, and though he tasted faintly of mint he really just tasted like  _lips_  which was a revelation in and of itself. Kurt hadn't thought about lips having their own taste before. His left hand came up to cup Blaine's jaw, and he reveled in the feeling of the rough hint of stubble under his thumb.  
  
What felt like it lasted forever was really barely more than a moment.  
  
He heard a sharp inhale, a gasping intake of breath, then felt Blaine move backward quickly - too quickly. Blaine stumbled back off the edge of the couch, nearly running over his own foot in his attempt to race out of the Commons, leaving Kurt alone and bewildered by the couch as the last strains of "Baby It's Cold Outside" played on the abandoned turntable.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is Kurt-centric. The next will be how Blaine spends his winter break (and be substantially more angsty).

The last person that Kurt wanted to see on his first night home for Christmas break was Rachel, which of course meant that was who showed up.  
  
Kurt sat on the couch in front of the tv, trying to pretend to pay attention to the evening news. His father sat on the other end, looking happy just to have him home; Kurt knew it hadn't been easy on his dad having him so far away so much of the time, and he could appreciate that. Most of the time he looked forward to breaks – and in particular, to going home – far more than anyone else at school.  
  
He had missed being home, but his mind was a million miles away.  
  
He didn't understand. Blaine liked him...didn't he? The only signs Kurt knew to look for were all there – he'd practically made a checklist to ensure that he didn't make a move if it wouldn't be okay. Blaine couldn't stop staring at him, and they sang flirty duets together, and he was always smiling at him in a way that no other boy (even Sam) ever had...and Blaine was a homosexual like he was. Unlike what he had later recognized as attraction to Finn, which wouldn't have been reciprocated because Finn was only interested in girls, Blaine was interested in boys. At least he was sometimes, that's what he'd said. Or what he'd nodded over.  
  
Right? Was Kurt even remembering it right anymore? It had been two months, and it felt like longer, and for all he knew-  
  
Maybe Blaine was interested in boys but he was too much like a girl. Maybe that was the problem. After all, the boys in town had never wanted anything to do with him because he was too feminine – too soft, too interested in clothes and fine cooking, not interested enough in sports and playing rough-and-tumble games. He'd never  _really_  been like a boy thanks to this ridiculous sexual inversion condition he'd had for as long as he could remember.  
  
Maybe Blaine wanted a boy who was like a  _boy_.  
  
He dismissed the thought quickly, reasoning that Blaine certainly seemed to want to spend time with  _Jean_ , who was an actual girl. A girl who acted more like a boy, maybe, he'd only met her once and she certainly didn't seem nearly as feminine as he did. She certainly didn't seem the play by the girls' rules, she was bold in a way he kind of respected. Like Rachel only less irritating and less garishly-dressed.  
  
She was wearing a red and green plaid skirt with knee socks in a colour that he assumed was meant to to be gold but looked more like the colour of cheap mustard. Her red and black plaid headband was in exactly the wrong scale to look even remotely good. But her sweater... He wasn't sure where she had found a black sweater with two white reindeer on it, but that was certainly what she was wearing.  
  
It didn't escape Kurt's notice that he wasn't the first person she looked at when she came into the room. “Hi Finn,” she said first with a grin.  
  
"Hey," Finn replied from the recliner. He'd been kind of out-of-sorts since Quinn left for...wherever it was she'd gone. Kurt knew enough of the story to be very glad he wasn't in Finn's shoes, at any rate. He couldn't imagine if someone he loved as much as Finn loved Quinn were to just up and leave one day without any warning. And even if Quinn hadn't chosen to go voluntarily, as they pretty much all suspected, that didn't help the feeling of empty confusion that read all over Finn's face. He looked a little more with-it when Rachel walked in, and Kurt had no idea if Finn might seem completely normal on days that weren't near a holiday...but he doubted it. He got the impression that Finn spent most of his time working silently in the shop and the rest singing in his room and trying not to think about her.  
  
It didn't help that he didn't have school or a plethora of Cheerios to focus his attention on, either, Kurt suspected. Or sports to reinforce his status as top dog.   
  
He wondered how many people in town knew the story. For that matter, Kurt wasn't entirely sure how many people in town even knew Quinn was gone. Rachel did because he'd filled her in - and, much to his dismay, she'd expressed just barely enough sympathy before inquiring about the rest of Finn's prospects. Apparently she wasn't as over him as she wanted everyone to believe.  
  
"How are you?" she ventured to Finn. Kurt caught her eye and gave her a 'don't even try' expression; her face fell for a moment before she turned to Burt with a pasted-on smile. "Mr. Hummel," she greeted him brightly.  
  
"What are you doing here, Rachel?" Kurt asked before she could attempt to make best friends with his family. It wasn't that he minded her talking to his father or Carole per se, but she had a tendency to take the opportunity to work on her method acting technique. He still wasn't too pleased with her from the time he'd walked in from the garage to find Rachel helping Carole with the dishes and talking about their magical second date to the pizza parlor, followed by the bowling alley.  
  
Like he would be caught dead in those shoes.  
  
"I thought I'd come see you - it's not every day my boyfriend comes home from school," she replied with a broad smile, like wasn't he just silly and adorable, then gave an exaggerated wink when she thought no one was looking.  
  
She was going to be the death of him, he swore. "True," he replied with a tight smile that he hoped conveyed how  _glad_  he was to see her while still making clear he kind of wanted to shake her right now. He stood and, as he had expected, she slipped her hand immediately into his. he was getting used to that part - slowly but surely. Mostly it just felt awkward, and usually when she did it she looked like she was trying to side-eye Finn into noticing or something. he wasn't sure if that was conscious on her part or not. Maybe years of trying to make Finn notice her made it such an ingrained part of her actions that she honestly didn't mean to keep doing it. Or maybe she did still like Finn and was using him every bit as much as he was using her, though for decidedly different purposes.  
  
He started to lead her down the hall to his room and heard his father call after them, "Door stays open." He said it every time, and every time Rachel squeezed his hand and grinned in victory, as though she was so proud that they were successfully convincing Kurt's family - like this meant she was doing something right. It just made him feel more awkward than he already did.  
  
The front dropped as soon as they were in his room, the door propped exactly halfway open. Rachel sat on the edge of Kurt's bed, her performance grin slipping into something more akin to a normal smile as she went from being his faux girlfriend to being his actual friend. "Have you seen Operation Petticoat yet? I know it's probably not as amazing much fun as it sounds like, I mean it would be better with Gene Kelly and if it involved actual petticoats and dancing, but it has Cary Grant and then we can-"  
  
"Why are you here?" Kurt asked bluntly, and Rachel looked confused for a moment, wounded. He didn't care. He-...okay, he did, but not enough right now. Not after spending two days trying to track Blaine down with no success whatsoever. Not after going over everything in his mind a hundred thousand times to the point where he honestly wasn't sure what he remembered and what he was making up. The last thing he wanted to do was sit in a dark theater with Rachel holding his hand all night, and watch Cary Grant and make stupid comparisons between him and Blaine and start into a rendition of "You Made Me Love You" even though that was supposed to be about Clark Gable instead. He wanted to sit in a dark room and listen to Connie Francis and drape himself elegantly over chairs as if they were fainting couches.  
  
"I...leave the day after tomorrow, and you just got back, and I won't see you again until it's almost time for you to go back to school," she said, looking like she didn't understand what she'd done wrong. She didn't, he knew that, because the truth was it wasn't her fault. "I wanted to see you. Even if we're not..." she glanced at the door as if to check no one was coming "...what everyone thinks we are, I still miss you. I only get to hear from you like twice a week, and we used to see each other a lot more than that - with school and glee club and everything."  
  
"I miss you too," he admitted begrudgingly, and his lack of a snappy comeback was more than evidence enough of his sincerity. Because he did miss her - and Mercedes too, badly. Hanging out with all boys was frustrating, even if they were much better guys than the ones at McKinley. None of them understood what made a movie romantic and moving, or why shopping was a fun way to spend an afternoon, or why Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were amazing.   
  
None of them except Blaine, at least.   
  
"So. Where are you going?" he asked, trying to change the subject away from the one thing he definitely didn't want to think about.  
  
"Cleveland. My mom's actually letting me go see my dad instead of having to sneak over there this year," she replied proudly. "She's not happy about it, but I told her that since I turn 18 soon anyway there really isn't any point in trying to prevent it. I'm staying for a week."  
  
Well. That didn't help him not think about things. He wanted to send her with a list of questions, things she could ask her dad and his...boyfriend? He didn't even know what the right word was, he only knew that 'roommate' wasn't it - Rachel had said 'lover' but first of all she also said 'coloured' and second of all that word was too... _intimate_  for him to really think without blushing. He wanted to give her a list of things to look out for and explain to him when she got back even though he could about guarantee that she would get it wrong or something and he would end up making things even worse with Blaine.  
  
If they could get worse.  
  
What he really wanted to do was beg to come with her, but even if her father was okay with that, his wouldn't be. There were distinct disadvantages to everyone thinking they were dating - he would be allowed to go somewhere with Mercedes and her family without so much as a second glance. Of course, she was practically family, but still.   
  
"Have fun," he offered quietly, his mind a million miles away.   
  
"I will," she replied brightly. "It'll be amazing. I plan on telling him that I know about everything and he doesn't need to pretend his lover actually lives in the room I'm staying in anymore." Kurt didn't see any way  _that_  could go badly, but Rachel ignored his side-eyed glance and judgmentally-quirked eyebrow. "Oh! And I brought your present." She dug into her large bag.  
  
"I hadn't even thought of- I haven't gotten do my shopping yet. There aren't many places to go near school and I have a week until-"  
  
"Oh, that's fine," she replied. "I'm used to Hanukkah shopping, which is usually earlier. This year's special - the first night is the same as Christmas, that hasn't happened in almost 50 years." She produced a broad, nearly-flat package about the size of a large folder, wrapped in hideous blue and green paper that Kurt suspected was intended for a boy's birthday or something. "I thought the blue and green made a great statement about joining the two holidays, both our heritage," she stated. "I know we hadn't talked about gifts, but I saw this and I thought of you - and us."  
  
Every time she said 'us', Kurt felt himself tighten a little, worrying that she might not really be as clear on this deal as she sounded like she was. "Oh?" He took the package and smoothed the paper with his thumb as he added, "Thank you" then tore it open. Inside lay a book of sheet music entitled "Broadway's Greatest Love Songs: Duets"  
  
"Since we're dating," she said, with an exaggerated wink and a grin, "I thought this would be perfect. After all, it means we have a ready-made duet partner when we go out singing places. And I know it's probably a lot lower than you're used to singing - your voice is beautiful, and you have exceptional control over your falsetto even if you can't sing as high as I can - but we could probably rearrange it a little bit if you wanted. I've already taken the liberty of selecting a few..." She took the book out of his hands, flipped through, and handed it back to him. "This one would be especially good."  
  
Kurt stared down at the title, tracing his thumb slowly over the letters. If he tried hard enough, he could keep his face from crumbling, even if he felt the tears pricking the back of his eyes - because of course it was this song. Of course. This was his life after all, of course this song was the one Rachel wanted to sing with him. And right this second, Blaine was two hours away wearing a ridiculous costume and singing this song to his own personal Andrews Sister with his damned charming grin and his stupid eyes and-  
  
"I really can't stay..." he sang quietly, more murmuring than actual tone.  
  
"The reason I thought it worked well is because the boy part and the girl part interchange - you know, in the movie it was deliberately reversed later on, with Red Skelton and-"  
  
"I know," he replied quietly. That was the problem.  
  
Because if it weren't reversible, this wouldn't have happened. If he could've just stayed in the girl part and not tried to be something bolder, then maybe...maybe Blaine wouldn't have run away. Maybe he would've just kept Kurt in that little falsetto box where he was picturing Jean instead of him, and Kurt wouldn't have tried to kiss Blaine, and they would still be speaking instead of...this. And Kurt would be able to think of Blaine without thinking about how his lips tasted like lips and his skin felt just a little rough.  
  
"What's wrong?" Rachel asked.  
  
He didn't even know where to begin. There was so much wrong - with Blaine, with them, maybe with him too he didn't evne know. M aybe this whole thing was his fault and he didn't know it.   
  
The signs were all there, how had he gotten it so horribly wrong?  
  
"I kissed Blaine," he said, lying across his bed, staring up at the ceiling and shaking his head. How stupid could he have been? If Blaine wanted to kiss him, he would've done it already. What made him think that the reason was just that Blaine was worried about making the first move or something?   
  
"And you didn't tell me until  _now_?" Rachel demanded. "What happened?"  
  
"He ran out of the room and won't speak to me." His tongue felt as thick and clumsy as his voice, tripping over the words as he tried not to think too hard about what he was saying, but he couldn't help it. "I don't understand it. We were so together on everything and then all of a sudden..."  
  
"Well...did he ever actually say he liked you?" she asked.  
  
"No. But he is homosexual, that much he said. Well. Nodded when I asked."  
  
"Did he make a move?"  
  
"No, but...the signs were all there. He couldn't stop staring at me, and we'd always sing these flirty duets together, and we talk all the time...and he'd touch my hand, or my arm, or my..." Rachel's blank look wasn't helping him feel any better. Instead it felt like he was grasping at straws - because he knew it was real. He knew it had been something, that they had  _something_ , but when asked to put his finger on what precisely that was - on what made him think that? "...Oh god, I made the whole thing up in my head, didn't I?"  
  
Maybe he really was crazy. Maybe other people could be a non-predatory homosexual but he couldn't. He had no idea anymore.  
  
What had he been thinking?  
  
"No," Rachel stated.  
  
He sat up to stare at her, eyes narrow in confusion. "No?" he repeated.  
  
She shook her head. "I've been through this before," she stated. "When Finn and I-"  
  
"That's a terrible example, Rachel, you were never together."  
  
"Only because he's been thoroughly devoted to Quinn and unlike certain other boys at this school that means something," she replied. He wasn't sure which boy had tried to say or do something, but his money was on Puck. Puck was usually the one at the center of those kind of things. "When I wanted to date Finn, he would do things like that. I can't even think of how many times we sang duets together and I would look into his eyes and  _know_  that he was feeling for me everything I was feeling for him. Him staring at me, me staring back at him and staring at him staring at me, singing songs that were too deep for mere words to express." She had on her 'dramatic' face, as Kurt tended to call it, as she stared off into the distance as though she could see the entire scene playing out again in front of her and was choosing to relive it in vivid detail because that would help convey to him just how much it meant. He had long since gotten used to it and simply gave her a barely-indulgent tight smile as she continued. "Of course, nothing could happen because he was dating Quinn, and now he's too heartbroken to even consider it. Though I suppose if anyone could help him through-"  
  
"Rachel," Kurt said warningly. If this was their arrangement, then it had to stay in place - if only because there was no way Rachel would be able to keep the secret were it not for their mutually-assured destruction. Mostly he just didn't see any way the relationship could end well, which would mean he would have to listen to it from both sides when it fell apart. Despite her adoration of Finn - which he could appreciate and had shared in his own way before the guy became his brother - the two of them would never work. They had nothing in common, she planned on leaving at the end of her senior year, and they were oblivious in completely incompatible ways: Rachel didn't notice anything outside herself and what directly related to her; Finn didn't notice...anything.  
  
Besides, it wasn't the same thing. If she had kissed Finn, he wouldn't have run away. He would have told her they shouldn't, or he might have done the more typical - if less honourable - thing and kissed her back. Maybe even broken things off with Quinn for her, depending on when ti had been and whether Quinn had been treating Finn like dirt again. This was...he didn't have all the words to describe why it was different, but it was. He knew that much.  
  
She fell silent for a moment, contemplating, then concluded, "He's the mouse."  
  
Just when he thought nothing more ridiculous could come from Rachel's mouth, she said something like that. "Excuse me?"  
  
She pointed to the still-open book, at the sheet music for "Baby It's Cold Outside." Rather than 'man' and 'woman', the parts were labeled 'wolf' and 'mouse' to indicate the pursuer and coy object of pursuit. "You made the first move, that makes you the wolf. While I'll admit that's surprising because you're kind of one of the girls and he's...not really, maybe that's not the way it works. So if he's the mouse, then he keeps saying no, no, he can't, he shouldn't, and wanting you to follow him to tell him all the reasons he  _should_  do this."  
  
That didn't sound quite right either. "So you're telling me that I should go after him more?" Kurt concluded, looking skeptical.  
  
"Absolutely," Rachel replied. "Girls like to be pursued, Kurt. You're certainly someone who goes after what you want - I would know. So am I. You should go after Blaine until he gives in. Now." She stood and smoothed her skirt. "Let's go watch sailors for a few hours. Then maybe you can take me out dancing."  
  
* * * * *  
  
Of the many areas of life that became more difficult when two families merged to become one, Kurt was certain that none was more tenuous to navigate than that of holidays.  
  
Kurt's mother had instilled in him from an early age the importance of traditions. Every year before he started school, she marked his growth on the back of the closet door. Every Easter they spent the night before dying eggs beautiful colours and staring at them instead of hiding them. Every year on his birthday he got a chocolate cake with white icin, and every Thanksgiving and Christmas there was a big dinner with all the trimmings.  
  
Then she died, and Mrs. Jones tried to step into a lot of them and gradually transition him out of a few of the others. It had been the year he was 11 that he suggested that, in the spirit of showing how thankful he and his dad were for Mrs. Jones keeping them alive and fed and everything (and being the closest thing to a mother figure he could have), they should host the Joneses for Thanksgiving. He'd learned enough cooking from her that he could manage - with supervision but not much help - so his dad and Mr. Jones and Mercedes' brother watched football in the living room while he made dinner, roping Mercedes in to help while Mrs. Jones watched dutifully from the table under "strict instructions" not to lift a finger.   
  
In return, she had hosted them for Christmas dinner, which helped fill the quiet emptiness of the day. Otherwise the day consisted of he and his father spending twenty minutes opening presents, then staring at each other and missing his mom and the way she sang carols the entire month of December no matter how much the people around town said it was too early. But heading over to the Joneses' around noon for dinner, themed television specials, and picking over leftovers around suppertime, had become a thoroughly enjoyable tradition -it felt like family. It  _was_  family.  
  
Enter Carole and Finn.  
  
It wasn't that Kurt minded dinner, though he did prefer ham to goose and Carole was used to fixing the latter - part of her own traditions, he supposed. It was just that he missed sitting on the braided rug with Mercedes and joking about how many stars could try to sing The Christmas Song in a single day on a single network. So as soon as dinner was over and his dad and Finn were settling onto the couch to watch something sports-related that he didn't care about, Kurt shrugged on his coat, adjusted his scarf, and tucked Mercedes' present under his arm. He chirped out an announcement of his intended whereabouts, then went quickly out to the car to drive across town.  
  
The scent of ham staying warm in the oven greeted him as soon as John opened the door. A semester at Howard had been good to him, and he looked more relaxed than Kurt remembered - if also a little rounder-faced. More adult somehow, like he'd grown into himself. From where he stood in the doorway he could hear Mr. Jones chuckling at something on television and Mrs. Jones scolding him for tracking crumbs all over from her famous Christmas cookies (which was an argument he'd heard every year for the better part of a decade now) and Mercedes upstairs singing along with Ella's Christmas album. He hated that it felt more like where he was meant to be than in his own house, with his father and stepmother and stepbrother...but Finn was sulking about missing Quinn and the tree had an assortment of ornaments he wasn't used to yet and it was just...  
  
He understood why so many of the guys from Dalton avoided going home for breaks. If it felt like that, awkward and offputting and not like being in your own place...  
  
He wondered how Blaine was surviving break. From how fall break had gone, he was under the distinct impression that the guy wanted to spend as little time there as he could.  
  
He was sure Jean was helping the time go faster.   
  
Not that he was bitter. Or lonely.  
  
He bypassed the living room, heading for the stairs to give Mercedes her present first thing. "Merry Christmas."  
  
She stopped singing when he spoke and looked up at him, eyes hardened into a glare. "Hello."  
  
Kurt blinked, confused. He hadn't spoken to her as recently as he would have liked, but it hadn't been that long had it? Not long enough that was pissed at him for not calling? "Mercedes-"  
  
"I didn't think you'd be over today."  
  
"What are you talking about? Every year-"  
  
"You wouldn't rather be with  _Rachel_? Celebrate Christmas with your girlfriend?"  
  
The anger in her voice was colder than he'd ever heard from her, and that included the year they were both twelve and hated everyone and everything including each other. It included the time he'd accidentally ruined her science fair project with too much glitter and the time she'd had a horrible day only to find that he had eaten the last cookie and misplaced all of her frustration onto him. He wasn't sure  _why_  she was upset with him over this, but somehow all that came out was-  
  
"She doesn't celebrate Christmas, she's Jewish." It wasn't until she rolled her eyes that he added, "And she's not exactly-"  
  
"I had to hear about it from your father. You couldn't even tell me?"  
  
"Honestly, Mercedes, I don't understand what the big deal is."  
  
She huffed and rolled her eyes again, crossing over to the record player to find another album. "All this time, I thought you were too busy, but you weren't - and you're dating  _her_?"  
  
It wasn't anything Kurt could put his finger on, but something about the way she seemed so bitter...like her problem wasn't with not knowing, but with not being the one he was dating. But that didn't make any sense: they were family. She was his best friend, and her mom was practically his mom and they joked about her annoyingly perfect big brother together because they were  _family_.   
  
"Mercedes..." he began slowly.  
  
She turned. "What? You gonna say it's not me, it's you? Some other stupid line? Look, I don't care - I just thought-...you're a good guy and you're not all self-involved and only into sports and what the other guys are into, and we have fun together. I thought we'd be a good match. But if you like  _Rachel_ -"  
  
He laughed - he couldn't help it. It wasn't funny, but at some point it was just so ridiculous... "Believe me, Mercedes, I'm not dating Rachel because I like her. It's just...easier this way."  
  
The shocked look that crossed her face was mild compared to the outright  _wrath_  that appeared moments later. "I thought if anyone wouldn't care, it would be you. For how much you talk up that fancy school and how accepting it is, but no-"  
  
Oh god. Now he had to tell her the truth. Because he couldn't make up anything that would sound good enough or real enough to make her stop thinking it had something to do with being afraid of what people would say seeing the two of them walking down the street holding hands. What he wouldn't give for that to be his biggest concern.  
  
"It's not about you. And I'm not just saying that," he tried to explain. "The truth is..." He wasn't sure how to say it without just  _saying it_ and he wasn't sure how to do  _that_  at all, but he couldn't let her think what she was thinking. And if anyone should know...it should be Mercedes. Mercedes was the person who knew the most about him in the world, she had been there for him when he had literally not a single person to talk to during the school day. "There is someone I like - but not Rachel. This person is...is Blaine." She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it and looked confused, then started to say something again but he jumped in before she could. He could feel his fingers quivering and tears starting to build up behind his eyes, even if he didn't know  _why_  except-  
  
What if she didn't want to see him? What if she was angry with him? Or said he was sick and never wanted to speak to him again and told everyone else? He-...he knew he didn't want to believe that she would do that, she was his  _best friend_ , but what if-  
  
He hadn't really told anyone before. He'd confirmed it when Rachel asked him, and he'd asked Blaine, but this-...this was different. Risky.  
  
Terrifying.  
  
"I'm...I'm a homosexual," he whispered, cursing the fact that of course the tears had to start  _then_  and his face had to get all red and blotchy and if he didn't seem pathetic before he certainly did now. "Rachel knows, that's why we're dating, but she's not who I like. I...like Blaine. I screwed it up, I think, but that's...that's who."  
  
Mercedes stared at him for what seemed like hours but was barely more than a few seconds. "Why didn't you tell me?"  
  
He didn't know how to say it was because he was terrified of what she would think of him, so he simply responded with "I've never really told anyone." It was true, just not all of it.  
  
She didn't say anything, just kind of nodded slowly and looked him up and down. After a long silence, she said, "I don't really know what to say to you right now."  
  
That hadn't been what he was expecting, and he wasn't entirely sure what to say to her not knowing what to say. He wanted that lighter feeling, that sense of being able to...to conquer anything that he'd gotten when he talked to Blaine about it. Instead he was left feeling uneasy, as though he were on unstable ground and didn't know what the status of their friendship was anymore. She wasn't calling him disgusting but wasn't reacting with the kind of enthusiasm he was used to seeing from her, either, and that was entirely disconcerting.  
  
Was this a normal reaction? Or was she just angry because she wished that he would have liked her instead?  
  
"I'm still me," he offered meekly, feeling like an idiot even as he said it. "I...Mercedes, you're the only best friend I've ever had. Please don't get weird on me." He gave her a pleading look, and after a moment she stood and wrapped her arms around him in a quick embrace; he let out a sigh of relief he hadn't known he was holding.  
  
"Were you always this tall?"  
  
The pivot wasn't what he'd been expecting, but he supposed it was better than staying on the subject. It was a ridiculous question, and he laughed a little. "No," he replied with a fakely-smug smile that looked more sad than he would've liked (but not nearly as conflicted as he actually was) - a year ago they'd been the same height. Now he towered over her, though he wasn't sure when that had happened. "Don't worry, Mercedes, I'll never look down on you," he teased.  
  
"Mmhmm," she replied dryly with a sarcastic look. "Get anything good?"  
  
It was common knowledge that the time immediately following Christmas was a prime fashion opportunity. The combination of gifted clothes and accessories, fantastic sales at the mall, and plenty of chances to wear the newly-minted ensembles around town made it a magical time of year.  
  
It felt good to retreat back into safe conversation like that, to play the same game they'd played for as long as he could remember. "Yes," he replied cryptically. This was how it always began.  
  
She pulled back to look at him, then guessed, "The pants, and...let's see. I've seen that shirt, I know you were talking about buying that jacket last time you were home, and no way did anyone in your house try to buy shoes, so I'm going to say the pants and the tie."  
  
Kurt quirked an eyebrow, his face giving no indication how well she had done. "That skirt has your mother written all over it. And...the necklace. I was with you when you bought the earrings...and the sweater used to be your mother's when we were kids."  
  
"Score?" Mercedes asked.  
  
"1 for 2 - pants, no tie, and you missed the scarf."  
  
"How do you do it?" she demanded, and Kurt grinned - that meant he was right. He almost always was.  
  
"It's my gift," he replied, flicking his hair back with one hand as he passed her the box containing her present. "And this is yours," he added.  
  
The black faux-fur stole would be a nice replacement for the leopard one she kept wearing - and would make her laugh because it was their go-to non-argument - and the pin with it was gorgeous if he did say so himself. Gold and big and costumey in exactly Mercedes' style. She laughed as she opened it. "It'll go great with my leopard shirt," she teased, and he gave her his best deadpan look.  
  
"Or that great skirt we found last summer, or the gorgeous blue dress you need to wear more often."  
  
There was another awkward silence as she appeared to be looking him up and down again, as though trying to figure out what about him was different now that she knew. He wasn't sure how to explain any more clearly that, according to all the reports he'd been able to find, he had been like this for a long time. Maybe forever, he wasn't sure.   
  
She pulled her eyes away and walked over to the top of her dresser, retrieving a wrapped package that looked suspiciously like an album. She handed it over and said, "It's supposed to be amazing."  
  
He unwrapped the present to reveal a new cast album: The Sound of Music. "It opened last month to rave reviews," he confirmed, tracing his fingers over the lettering on the front. "Plus you know how I like anything where I get to sing Mary Martin," he added with a faint smile.  
  
She returned the smile warily. "I hope you like it - when you hear it. With Rachel, I know if you're...non-dating now, you'll probably-"  
  
They'd listened to more albums together than he could count - especially if they were new purchases or presents. South Pacific had been together (his birthday two years ago), and Peter Pan when they were probably only about 12, and Lady Sings the Blues for Mercedes' birthday when they were 15. It was supposed to be something they did together, dating or no dating.  
  
"Mercedes." He handed it to her. "Put it on." She grinned and walked to the record player to start the soundtrack, then they assumed a typical position crossways on her bed to listen. It felt gloriously normal, and Kurt reveled in it.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is Hard R/NSFW.

He had been right: the costumes were ridiculous.  
  
Apparently the idea of a military-style costume had been good, just not for their song - he'd seen the couple singing a duet version of "I'll be Home for Christmas" walking around in exactly the paired ensemble he had envisioned for Jean and himself before the show. He supposed that made sense and everything, more sense than for a song about wanting to stay after a party, but it would have been a lot better than...whatever the hell  _this_  was.  
  
They were going for some sort of 1920s opulence because the crazed tech director thought "What's in this drink?" was a reference to moonshine (Blaine wasn't even asking what the tech director had been drinking when he decided that)...and because nobody in the Columbus Historical Society had any post-war costumes or props. Jean had tried to point out that the song didn't exist in the 1920s, but that seemed to matter less than the spectacle of the two of them onstage in what Jean had started referring to as the "Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald look."  
  
He had lucked out; the striped doublebreasted suit was ugly but not insane. The worst part of his costume was the white fedora that kept wanting to fall off. Poor Jean....well. They weren't sure where the sequin-covered cloche had come from or what deranged, gaudy woman had worn it nearly four decades ago, but it was hardly the only part of Jean's ensemble that required practice to avoid making beads clack together loudly enough to distract from the singing.  
  
 _I've got to get home,_  she sang, flitting around the makeshift bar that served as their main set piece.  
  
But baby it's bad out there. He leaned against the bar, pretending to stare at her longingly.   
  
 _Say, lend me a coat_  
It's up to your knees out there  
 _You've really been grand_  
I thrill when you touch my hand he sang convincingly, but when she grazed his hand he felt none of the terrifyingly electric shivers working their way up his arm that he had gotten when Kurt had-  
  
No.  _No_. He wasn't going there. Not ever, but certanily not right now on a stage in front of a couple hundred well-dressed potential contacts who were donating large sums of money in exchange for getting to see the show.  
  
If there was one thing Blaine knew how to do, it was how to act out emotions in song whether he necessarily felt them or not. Just because every moment wasn't Judy Garland's 'Smile' didn't mean now was the time to be distracted.  
  
 _But don't you see_  
How can you do this thing to me?  
  
It was so much less anguished than the previous week. This felt better. It felt less overwhelming, less terrifyingly intense - a kind of mildly pleasant feeling. He preferred it this way, to be entirely honest.   
  
But her smile didn't fill him with the same giddy kind of excitement that Kurt's did. He didn't want to write sonnets to the mysterious colour of her eyes.  
  
 _There's bound to be talk tomorrow,_  she sang with a coy look that seemed amplified by the pounds of eye makeup they had put her in, leaning over the bar.  
  
Think of my lifelong sorrow  
 _At least there will be plenty implied_  
If you got pneumonia and died  
 _I really can't stay_  
Get over that holdout  
  
He leaned over the bar, close like he was going to kiss her, but the moment felt fake, staged, not at all realistic. They both knew it; it had felt that way during rehearsal, too. He could fake it well enough to make it look real from the audience, but he and Jean knew it wasn't one of those magical performances where the people onstage were acting out how they really felt through song.  
  
Maybe he was just too hard on himself. That was the point of acting, right? Doris Day and Rock Hudson probably weren't actually in love with each other - even though he wasn't married to that secretary anymore. But the audience believed it. That was the important part.  
  
It was all perception.  
  
Jean broke the moment at the choreographed time, reaching over to grab his fedora and place it on her head over the sequined, bead-tasseled monstrosity of a hat on her own head with a teasing grin as they sang the final line. The applause was hearty, not thunderous, but one of the loudest of the night which was more than enough to send Blaine's adrenaline pumping. He whisked Jean offstage and back toward the dressing rooms where everyone was milling around, waiting to go on or comparing post-show notes and waiting for the curtain call.  
  
"That went great," she grinned, flushed and practically bouncing in her heels, beads clacking as she made her way quickly down the stairs.  
  
"They really loved it."  
  
"Of course they did - even if you took a few liberties with notes in there," she teased.  
  
"You mean like you took liberties with the choreography?" he shot back, grinning. "You must've sat on every stool on that set."  
  
"It was playful."  
  
"It looked like you were tired or something."  
  
Jean gave an indignant gasp, swatting playfully at his arm. "You try doing that in these shoes and then talk to me about what makes a person tired," she shot back as they reached the bottom landing of the stairs. Blaine turned to face her, poised to make some kind of snappy retort, but the positioning gave him pause; Jean stood with her back to the cement block wall, one hand resting on the bottom few inches of the metal handrail. He faced her, one hand just above hers on the railing, fedora in the other. As people descended the stairs and made the turn of the landing, he found himself moving closer to her, watching the way she looked up at him.  
  
She was shorter than he was, which wasn't the case with every girl he'd ever been around unfortunately, and he liked it. It made him feel strong and like he had the upper hand, even though she seemed determined to thwart that at every turn - never let him think he was the one in charge and she was some shrinking violet. He liked that part better, actually. Of all the things that felt right to him no matter how many social rules it broke, this was the least wrong - merely unconventional rather than unacceptable.   
  
"What are you doing tomorrow night?" she asked.  
  
"Mm?" he replied, getting distracted by the way her eyes looked in this dim light - a little more vibrant, tiny bit greener-  
  
And like Kurt's.  
  
He swallowed hard and tried to shove the thought away, dragging his gaze down to her lips (which looked nothing like Kurt's, fuller and less spread and with just a hint of heart-shaped pout), as she said in a quiet voice, "I think you should ask me out."  
  
"I-" He wondered what it would be like to kiss her, if maybe...maybe it would feel nice. Maybe he would want her then. "I can't tomorrow," he said apologetically. "My parents' annual Christmas party."  
  
"Oh?"   
  
The look on her face...she was waiting to either get an invitation or hear that he was taking someone else. He wasn't, but he wasn't about to ask her. The key to these parties was to get in and out of conversations as quickly as possible without anyone noticing and thinking him rude, to talk only about as impersonal, professional a topic as he could muster. If he showed up to this soiree with a new girl, he would spend all night bombarded by questions about what they meant to each other and what a catch she might be eh (nudge nudge) and about her background and breeding and what her father did. It would be excrutiating, make him want to crawl out of his skin and scream and jump on top of the dining table to just let everything  _out_ , to exorcise every demon clawing its way through his chest - especially  _that_  one.  
  
"It's a small gathering," he lied. "But next week sometime, I'd love to take you out - if you're free."  
  
She gave a little pout and a sad sigh. "My parents and I leave the day after Christmas to go visit relatives in Wisconsin. We get back the day before school starts again."  
  
"Then I guess...we'll see each other then?" he offered lamely. "After you get back."  
  
She offered a sad smile. "Yes. After I get back."  
  
There was a quiet moment that felt surprisingly empty and expectant, as though he was meant to say something but didn't know what. Maybe-...maybe he should kiss her. Just to see, you know, maybe he hadn't given it enough of a chance. Maybe he just needed to sing more with girls, to kiss girls, maybe that was where the intensity was and he was just missing it because he hadn't done enough of it.  
  
But it didn't feel  _right_ , and he got the feeling that if Jean really wanted him to kiss her, she would have given him a pretty big sign. He didn't imagine her to be the kind who held back and waited to be pursued, not like other girls - not if she was the one saying he should ask her out.  
  
Still, he should try. Even if she didn't feel a particularly pressing need to kiss him, he needed to know. To see, to prove to himself that this could work.  
  
Cupping her face, he leaned in-...and chickened out. He kissed her cheek, and she smiled shyly before kissing his in return. She studied him a moment, then seemed to decide the moment was gone and ducked out from between him and the wall to walk down the hall to the dressing room.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The party was exactly as he remembered it from previous years: long, stuffy, and filled with people whose entire lives could be reduced to perfectly practiced sentences about absolutely nothing of substance.  
  
He smiled charmingly as he wound his way through the men's corner of the living room, where the smell of cigar smoke hung thick around the collars of wool suits and pre-dinner scotch seemed to mean downing at least three - slowly, of course, they weren't like those drunks who just swallowed down everything to numb their pain; they drank to enjoy the taste and the burn as they recounted tales of business trips to California and associates in other countries who didn't understand local customs to be met with guffawing laughter even by those who similarly misunderstood the joke.  
  
The women, meanwhile, gathered in the sitting room. He couldn't hear what they were saying, but he gathered from the expression on his mother's face that it wasn't any more interesting than what was going on where he was. Not that there was much variety in her expression - or anyone's in that house.  
  
The smile slipped for a moment and he found himself feeling almost guilty, as though he were secretly the only person in that room who wasn't a robot and therefore was able to actually change expressions. The only one capable of feeling  _anything_ , because they clearly felt nothing at all. Not the way they backslapped and laughed at things that weren't funny and responded to tales of a person losing a life's fortune in a bad gamble with hmms and "That's too bad, but y'know, I told him to stay away from that track."   
  
When he was younger, he wondered if maybe he'd gotten some other part that no one else had, something that made him  _feel_. Then he turned 12 and realized what other feelings he had that no one else did, and it stopped seeming like such a great secret advantage and more like a curse.  
  
This was the goal, he reminded himself, feeling a sharp pang of despair in his chest. This was what he would grow up to become, this was...this was the ultimate aspiration of anyone who didn't want to grow up to be a freak, an outcast, something sick or pitiable. If he was going to be a healthy, productive member of adult society, then this - all of this - was what he should be aiming himself toward.  
  
He wanted that, he knew. When push came to shove, he wanted all of this - from the bland canapes and too many drinks, to the flawlessly elegant wife in a party dress that cost too much to be worn only once. He wanted what it represented. He could feel uneasy when his father talked about normalcy like it was the be-all and end-all, but he had never actually wanted anything else. Not really. He might talk about wishing he could be more open about his family heritage or even think for a fleeting moment how nice it might be to feel less stigmatized by his illness (after all, no one blamed diabetics for their condition, right? Generally no one tried to fire them for having a glandular malfunction), but when he really thought about it for more than five seconds...he wanted this.  
  
Didn't he?  
  
Because if he was going to say that he didn't want any of this, shouldn't he have some better idea of what it was that he  _did_  want? Otherwise, he was simply one of those ungrateful, rebellious teenagers that they made movies about who flew in the face of convention for no other reason than to say that they  _could_. As much as he could understand Jim's frustration in "Rebel Without a Cause," ultimately at the end of the movie he started conforming, right? He introduced Judy to his parents ...and the lack of convention meant  _death_. Plato  _died_  in the end. Was that-  
  
Was he seriously standing in the middle of a party debating which character he was in a James Dean movie?   
  
It was oddly less depressing than looking around him. An entire room of people at a party and not one of them looked happy. Not even remotely  _alive_. Just existing. He wondered if any of the rest of them secretly felt as miserable as he did, if he could see it in their eyes or something if he looked hard enough...or if he really was born too different. He couldn't imagine any of the people in that house getting up on a stage and expressing themselves the way he did, or painting something moving, or feeling  _anything_ -  
  
Except for maybe his mother.  
  
She used to, he remembered that. He vaguely remembered her singing songs around the house when just the two of them were around when he was young. before the incident. Before whatever had happened at one of these parties to make his father practically cart her off to the asylum and return her exactly as she had been, minus one soul.  
  
Was that what would happen to him? Would he just keep standing in these rooms full of people yet completely alone, until one day he cracked and started yelling or ranting or  _singing_ , get a tranquilizer in the arm, and wake up with part of him missing?  
  
Would it just ebb away gradually until he didn't even know it was gone?  
  
Did his mother care enough to miss it?  
  
"Is something bothering you?" his father's voice startled him, and he turned to look too quickly.  
  
"I'm sorry sir?"  
  
"You seem distant tonight."  
  
Apparently the analysis of genuine emotions took a person too far away to be an emotionless robot, he thought bitterly. Instead he pasted on his best smile. "No, sir, I'm fine."  
  
"Good then. I want you to meet someone." He didn't let his smile slip as his father led him over to a colleague who evidently had some sort of connection to Yale and wanted to ask about his application.  
  
He knew exactly the practiced answers to give.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Once the house was empty again - save his parents at opposite ends of the house downstairs, and the help flitting around the kitchen to clean up - Blaine practically barricaded himself in his room. He felt stiff, aching from trying to hold his perfect posture and keep his gestures narrow and appropriate. His shoulders were sore, as though he'd been carrying tension in them all night without realizing it, and as his fingers carefully unknotted his tie and unfastened the first button, the sense of relief that washed over him was monumental.  
  
It really had been a long night, when just taking off his tie felt that good - he wasn't someone who minded wearing a tie, to him it was such a mundane part of clothing that it was like saying he was bothered by wearing a shirt. There wasn't any question of it.  
  
But tonight...  
  
Dinner had felt longer than usual somehow, as though every single person had to ask every single other person the same question twenty times. Maybe it just appeared that way because he was already frustrated with the whole thing - that was more likely. He doubted that his parents' friends had suddenly gotten more ridiculous over the course of a year, or that they had actually multiplied like he thought at one point.   
  
The girl he was paired with, the other party to make the table even, was a sophomore at Ratcliffe. She had wavy blonde hair and a mystified expression that reminded him of that friend of Kurt's over in Lima. He wanted to be able to attribute the simultaneous warm and icy feelings in his stomach to her, but even he couldn't convince himself of that one.  
  
Oh  _Kurt_  he thought as he slid off his jacket and laid it neatly over his desk chair. Why did the boy have to be so frustrating? Why couldn't he just be appropriate? There was no reason they couldn't have been friends if Kurt hadn't done something stupid like go and try to kiss him. If Kurt could just behave himself and understand that even if he wasn't ready to stop being sick yet...if he just knew that at the very least he needed to not  _act_  on those feelings when he had them...  
  
Feeling a certain way was still an illness, of course, but it wasn't nearly as bad as acting on it. Acting on it meant he had given in to his impulses and  _now_...  
  
That made him severe, didn't it?  
  
His heart ached for Kurt. The poor boy just didn't understand the way things had to be. He didn't know how sick he was.  
  
And Blaine didn't have the heart to tell him.  
  
He flicked open the buttons of his shirt slowly as he padded to the record player and selected an album. He needed to exorcise the feelings he'd been holding in all evening, to just get them all out there and start feeling better instead of exhausted and half-dead. He smiled faintly as he saw it - the [perfect song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzkszgjkj6Q) to act it all out.  
  
 _Oh yes, I'm the great pretender  
Pretending that I'm feeling well  
My need is such  
I pretend too much  
I'm lonely but no one can tell_  
  
Did he pretend too much? He wasn't entirely sure. He knew he felt like any pretending was too much, but maybe that was just the effect of the night. Maybe he didn't pretend enough. After all, sometimes if a person pretended to feel a certain way for long enough, they could feel it - that was what he did with music all the time. Or like in "The King and I": "The result of this deception is very hard to tell/For when I fool the people I feel, I fool myself as well."  
  
If he pretended to feel like everyone else for long enough, that might make him actually like them. Hell, that might be what everyone else felt like. Maybe every person in his parents' party was secretly alive under that thick exterior and just so far under a mask of pretending that they had even fooled themselves into thinking they weren't.  
  
But was that any better?  
  
 _Oh yes, I'm the great pretender  
Adrift in a world of my own  
I play the game  
But to my real shame  
You've left me to dream all alone_  
  
Because as much as he wanted to stop feeling some of these things...a certain thing in particular that he shoved back every time it started to bubble up...there was something even more terrifying about not feeling anything at all. As wrong as some of his feelings were, as much as he wanted to get rid of them...was it worth it?  
  
He knew what it would mean, trying to go fix himself and get rid of this once and for all. He would turn into his mother. He would become the guy who stared blankly at drink glasses in his hand and wore fake smiles that didn't ever seem to have someone behind them. He would stop feeling any of the good things, too, he would just feel  _nothing_  - like going from a world of bright, vibrant hues back to the black and white fields of Kansas.  
  
Was it worth that? Could anything  _ever_  be worth that?  
  
His mother didn't sing anymore. She had never sung much, but now it wasn't at all. None of his parents' friends did except the occasional innocuous, insipid carol plinked out on the grand piano in the living room. Nothing with purpose. Nothing with emotion. Nothing that  _meant_  anything.  
  
Could anything be worth giving that up?  
  
 _Too real is this feeling of make-believe  
Too real when I feel what my heart can't conceal_  
  
The way his heart poured out on those lines - would it be better to fix himself than to feel that, whatever that was? The mixture of anguish and exuberance that defied any better explanation but made him feel so much better when it came out...was it better to get rid of that in exchange for not being sick anymore?   
  
 _Oh yes, I'm the great pretender  
Just laughing and gay like a clown  
I seem to be  
What I'm not, you see  
I'm wearing my heart like a crown  
Pretending that you're still around_  
  
And that was only taking the emotional into account. The physical- He shuddered to think about it. Standard protocol in his father's practice for latent cases was a combination of antipsychotic medications and electroshock therapy to fix the neurological impulses that kept misfiring, causing attraction where attraction should never be.  
  
Non-latent cases meant aversion therapy, and he wanted to avoid that at all cost. He shuddered, his voice faltering as he thought about it, legs involuntarily squeezing tightly together as if to protect his testicles from what would await them if ever his case progressed.   
  
There was no need to cure latent cases, he concluded. Action was the real problem. Action was where the immoral conduct came in. Everyone had immoral  _thoughts_  - he thought sometimes about wanting to shove a particular teacher, or any number of students from his old school. As long as he kept remembering that was wrong, that it would get him in trouble and would just be mean and violent and  _wrong_ , he wouldn't give into his impulses and everything was fine.  
  
He was fine.  
  
And if controlling his impulses was the price he had to pay for feeling  _human_  instead of like one of those frightening creatures at Disneyland or the even more frightening creatures in his parents' living room, then...then so be it. Because even the tumultuous feelings over...that thing Kurt had tried to do to him...even that wasn't worth giving up music.  
  
He changed into his pajamas, selecting a book from the shelf, and settled in to read while listening to the rest of the Platters' album.  
  
* * * * *  
  
It didn't start as a dream, it started as a memory.  
  
He was singing in the Commons with Kurt, that same damned song that had been stuck in his had for weeks, only this time he knew from the time he gazed into Kurt's eyes that he wanted to kiss him. He reached past him to pluck out the interlude on the piano, and that was it. By the time he scurried over to the fireplace, he knew he had played hard to get exactly long enough for Kurt to want to get him.  
  
And oh, how he wanted Kurt to want to get him. How he wanted  _Kurt_.  
  
Kurt sidled up next to him near the mantle to sing about how he needed Blaine to lend him a coat, and that was Blaine's cue. He took hold of Kurt's jacket lapels roughly, noticing the glistening Warbler pin on the left side, and pressed him backwards against the alcove to the right of the fireplace. Kurt gasped softly as his back his the wood paneling, the small of his back arching to avoid the chair rail molding, but Blaine didn't care. He couldn't help himself anymore - the lips looked delicious, and he was determined to find out if they were or not.  
  
He leaned in and kissed Kurt hard and fast, desperate to taste him and hear him and  _feel_  him. He tasted minty and sweet and made little gasped, keening noises against Blaine's lips. With every movement of their mouths, Kurt arched forward a little more until he was almost rubbing against Blaine's leg.  
  
Kurt was hard; when he pressed forward, Blaine realized that they both were. He didn't know why he hadn't noticed before. They both wanted this, wanted each other  _so_  much-  
  
He reached down to fumble with Kurt's belt then the button of his trousers, and kept feeling like Kurt should be telling him to stop though he couldn't for the life of him figure out why. He pulled the belt out from the loops, wanting it fully out of the way rather than just moved a little, and Kurt giggled at the noise it made slapping at the carriers then skittering across the wooden floor.  
  
Kurt reached down to rub his palm over Blaine's growing erection, almost  _purring_  with this pleased grin on his face like he was winning some contest or something, like he was proving just how amazing he was. He groaned, and Kurt leaned in to nuzzle his neck; the feeling of Kurt's hot breath against the skin just below his ear was almost more incredible than the feeling of Kurt squeezing his cock and that was really saying something.  
  
He wanted Kurt to do that again - and keep doing it over and over - but there was something he  _needed_  first.  
  
He nipped at Kurt's neck, leaving dark red marks on the fine porcelain skin, pressing his leg between Kurt's as he began to rise up on his toes and sink back down again, letting his thigh rub against Kurt's growing erection. Kurt's mewling was incredible, like he desperately wanted more but was afraid to ask, and Blaine was more than happy to take care of that. He sank to his knees, almost falling, and just stared at the tenting cloth in front of his face. With a shaky, excited inhale, he reached to lower Kurt's zipper, then reached in to fish out what he really wanted. He heard Kurt gasp as his fingers closed around the hardon, and he let out a soft sigh as he felt the soft, smooth skin in his palm. It was softer than his own - the skin, at least.   
  
It was like the world stopped for a moment when he saw the prick - big and thick and leaking and  _hard_ , so damn hard, and his mouth was practically watering as he sat there and stared at it. Kurt spoke for the first time since they stopped singing, practically growling, "Taste it" and that was all the encouragement he needed. Blaine surged forward, taking the entire impossibly large thing into his mouth and sucking as hard as he could, bobbing up and down and feeling his own cock grow and swell until it felt like it was completely filling the front of his pants such that he couldn't even  _move_.  
  
Blaine awakened partway from the dream, enough to recognize that the erection of seemingly improbable size and hardness - at least it still seemed bigger than usual, but that might have just been the sleep talking - was his own. He closed his eyes, reaching down into his pajama pants to grasp himself as he attempted to reconjur the images from the dream.  
  
His mind had skipped the next little part, somehow, because now they were on the big leather couch - Blaine was lying on his back, legs up over the couch arms, and completely naked from the waist down. Kurt knelt on the arm, his legs straddling Blaine's knees, and leaned forward toward Blaine's swollen cock. He could see Kurt's still-engorged dick swaying heavily between his legs, and his round, pale ass was up such that when he leaned forward Blaine had an incredible view of Kurt's long, slim back from neck until it disappeared over the crest of his buttcheeks. Kurt licked his thin, pale, pink lips and formed a deliberate O-shape before lowering his mouth-  
  
In his bed, Blaine stroked himself firmly, timing them with the images of Kurt's bobbing head. At some point - probably about when, in the half-dream, Kurt lifted up to release a hot puff of air over the head of Blaine's cock - Blaine shoved down his pajama pants to his knees, trying to get a better angle and more room because oh dear god the things that Kurt was doing within the confines of his brain. With the mental image of Kurt sinking all the way down, cheeks hollowed from the suction, Blaine came hard over his hand and stomach with a groan into the empty darkness of his bedroom.  
  
Breathing hard, he rolled onto his back, hand wiping on the sheet beside him as his brain attempted to start firing normally. Should he go back to sleep now? he wondered dimly with a faint smile on his face, endorphins coursing through his still-sleepy body. He wondered if he could get back into the dream now - it wasn't every night he thought of a boy licking his-  
  
He sat bolt upright as the realization of what he'd done hit him, his lungs clenching in his chest to the point where it felt like he could barely breathe.  
  
Oh god. Oh no. No no no no no no. What had he  _done_?  
  
The mental image of Kurt and his beautiful, disgusting mouth sent panic through him, starting in his chest and shooting up to his cheeks where the skin flushed hot before rocketing down to his stomach where an icy clench began. He hastily pulled his pajama bottoms back into place and stumbled across the hall to the bathroom, feeling like he might throw up. What he'd done- that crossed a line. It crossed a line from being latently ill into being  _sick_. It went from just wanting to  _almost doing_  and if he were in a room with Kurt-  
  
...If he had the opportunity...  
  
He had wanted it when Kurt kissed him. He had wanted to take Kurt's face in his hands and just kiss him until their lips were chapped and they felt like they couldn't breathe because they'd spent so long sucking in oxygen in deep gasps between kisses. He had wanted to pull him close and see if his body felt as leanly muscular as it looked like it might beneath the uniform and those fancy coats he liked to wear. He had  _wanted_ -  
  
Just like tonight he had wanted. Wanted so deeply that he didn't resist it and in fact indulged it. He had at least been able to push Kurt away before Christmas. Now? With how much he had enjoyed the thought of doing all of those filthy, disgusting,  _hot_  things in that dream, as easily as that had brought him to orgasm...  
  
He had only stopped wanting when he thought about what it meant, and that terrified him. Because what happened if Kurt tried to kiss him again? Now that he had gotten sicker, would he be able to control himself and step back again?  
  
He leaned back against the wall heavily, breathing ragged, forehead and neck and back drenched in sweat that made his hair stick down in matted curls. He needed a shower. He just wasn't sure whether it should be scalding hot to scrub every reminder of what he'd done from his skin, or ice cold to prevent him from wanting anymore.  
  
He didn't feel horny; he felt filthy.  
  
Twisting the knob for hot water, he stepped under the spray and gasped at how hot it was. It hurt, but he didn't care. It was better than- He grabbed the washcloth and began to frantically scrub the dried cum off his stomach. It shouldn't be there. It should never have been there. He shouldn't have been thinking about Kurt, he should...he should be thinking of Jean if he was going to think of anyone - a girl he halfway liked, even if he found the entire idea kind of revolting and downright shocking.  
  
Except it wasn't. Something had to be new to be shocking, and this...this wasn't new at all. Not thinking about it, anyway. Not picturing- Usually he was able to stop it was all. It wasn't even new to be thinking about Kurt - not after the weekend he'd spent at Kurt's house and  _in Kurt's bed_ , when Kurt had left early and he woke up just smelling Kurt  _everywhere_  and practically able to still feel the boy beside him, and he had thought about...pictured...imagined the feeling of Kurt's soft hands on his face and the hard press of their bodies against each other-  
  
Even now, under the spray so hot it made him feel like his skin was burning off, he found himself wanting that. Wanting to feel Kurt's leg up around his hip and his breath against his neck and to smell his cologne a thousand times more intense than on the pillow. Wanting to taste the strange and intriguing mint-and-tea combination he'd noticed on Kurt's lips in the split second he hesitated before pulling back. Wanting to see Kurt unfasten each layer of clothing until he was left standing bare-chested beside the bed, lean and pale and not at all like the muscular men in magazines that his father's patients had seen - or tried to sneak if they were difficult cases. Wanting to feel Kurt press down against him wanting just as much - just as hard-  
  
Oh god.   
  
A panicked, anguish-filled sob clawed its way up from his throat as he felt the unwanted biological reflex kicking in again, his cock bobbing slowly upward with every thought of Kurt being near him. He tried scrubbing at it hard with the washcloth, hoping that maybe the roughness of the terrycloth fabric and the harshness of his motions would deter it, but it almost made things worse. No. No no no, he wasn't going to-...thinking it while he was asleep was one thing, he couldn't help what he dreamed about. Acting on it through the fog of recent awakening was a bad sign but didn't inherently mean-  
  
But wanting it this much when he was fully awake, fully conscious of what it would mean and why it was wrong to want this?  
  
That meant he couldn't fix this himself anymore. If even trying to cause himself pain in the hopes of holding onto a fragment of negative association wasn't working - if even knowing he was going to feel this rightfully filthy and diseased after the fact didn't stop him from  _wanting-_  
  
And not just from desiring, but from  _acting_...  
  
He needed help.  
  
He sank against the wall of the shower, the tiles feeling icy against his back in a way that left him dizzy and disoriented. Why was this happening to him? he wondered with a choked-off gasp, thankful at least for the way the shock of the cold stopped his burgeoning erection. He...he was trying to do everything right. He had identified a problem. he knew this was wrong. He knew he wasn't supposed to want it and he was trying every single negative association he could think of - that was the protocol. He knew that. The protocol was to associate pain and unpleasurable things with unnatural sexual attraction to prevent future desire. He'd learned about the phenomenon generally in his health class during the tiny unit fragment on psychology. If he associated enough bad things with being like this, that was supposed to be enough.  
  
He was doing everything right. Why wasn't it stopping?  
  
He raked his hands over his face, leaning more heavily against the wall. Why couldn't he fix this? What was he doing wrong? Should...should he be avoiding everyone that made him feel this way? Kurt, in particular? Should he be trying to stay away?  
  
He couldn't, came the visceral response. The idea of not seeing Kurt at school, of avoiding him between classes, of not talking to him after Warbler practice or during lunch- felt like something was curling up and dying inside him at even the thought of that kind of action. He couldn't look into those amazing eyes and say no. He couldn't look at Kurt and hear him ask about doing something and walk the other direction.   
  
Which meant this really wasn't something he could do on his own anymore. He needed- oh god, he needed help. He needed help so badly. If he was this bad off? He needed help  _now_.  
  
Maybe not right this second, he allowed. He didn't think he would be a danger to himself or anyone else at 3:00 on Christmas morning. He could- He drew in a shaky breath, trying to calm himself and steady his twitching fingers. He could wait until morning. Really he could wait a couple days - he wasn't going to ruin Christmas.  
  
Assuming they even acknowledged him when he spoke, that would kill the day and be a constant annual reminder of his illness. Like how he had gotten the chickenpox once on Easter and now, every year, he spent spring break feeling the phantom itch unscratchable beneath his skin. Or how he thought about his disgusting urges every year during Initiation. He didn't want to have to think about his disease every Christmas, too.  
  
With any luck, he wouldn't have to think about it ever again once he got help.  
  
His stomach clenched violently and left him feeling choked as he realized this meant he had progressed past the point of even just the medication he was afraid of. This meant electrodes on-  
  
No. It was...it would be worth it, he tried to reassure himself. It was just like a bigger version of the pin trick, something that would be more permanent. He hadn't minded the pin so much at the time, it was only when it stopped working that it caused a problem. This would...it would be good for him. Fix him.  
  
This would be worth it, he concluded. Feelings alone wouldn't be worth losing the brighter colours in the world, but for  _action_ , for something of this severity...  
  
"Yes," he whispered into the unforgiving echo of the shower. It sounded impossibly loud to his ears. "I'll tell them."  
  
Sometime soon, at least.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Sometime soon" turned into ten days.  
  
He meant to. He  _wanted_  to. But there was no good way of saying it.   
  
How could he dash everything they wanted for him? How did you tell someone that you were sick, especially when they were people you couldn't really tell anything important to? How were you supposed to have a deep conversation with people for whom 'deep' meant correcting posture or speaking in generalities about the best way to defeat the communists and secure the American way of life from those godless machines? How did you bring up to your mother and father the subject of an illness for which the cure was arduous and it was widely known to be a disease caused by parents?  
  
How could you tell someone you were ruined and it was all their fault?  
  
He had never been good at expressing himself in any way other than song, and he didn't think there was an appropriate melody to sing about how disgusting and disturbed he was. Even if they weren't the kind of people who would find his bursting into song incredibly inappropriate regardless of its subject or message, that wouldn't be a very good idea. Which meant he was left with words, and trying to figure out the best way of addressing a topic he didn't want to ever have to talk about.  
  
He'd never been a brave guy, always choosing avoidance and deflection instead of confrontation, running away instead of fighting to the death, and he had no idea what to say.  
  
 _Kurt would know,_  he thought with a wry smile and a choking laugh as he sat in his room every morning and tried to summon the strength to tell them over breakfast.  _Today I'll tell them. Today I'll get help._  Then he'd get stuck on the next sentence and curse the fact that he didn't know what to say and think that Kurt would know because Kurt was better at confrontation than he was.  
  
Too bad Kurt was also far sicker than he. At least he  _knew_  he was ill. He wasn't resistant. Kurt still...  
  
If they banded together maybe- Use his knowledge and Kurt's bravery? They could go tell his father together and save themselves both. Save each other.  
  
But that would require knowing how to talk to Kurt. Or feeling strong enough to be in the same room as the beautiful,  _beautiful_  boy and not act on what he felt.  
  
That was even more impossible than telling his parents.  
  
On the night before he was due to leave for school, knowing his time had run out and his options had dwindled, he found himself standing outside the closed door of his father's study. He had learned from an early age not to bother him there unless it was "a matter of exceeding importance," which almost nothing in his life ever rose to. His admission to Yale or Princeton might, but short of that...  
  
This would, he knew. If he could say anything, which he didn't know.  
  
Four times he rose his fist to knock, mentally rehearsing his speech in his head - about how he'd felt this way for so long and he knew it was a sickness and he was sorry and he had tried so hard to resist but he couldn't fight anymore and he wanted - no,  _needed_ , he corrected himself - help. But each time-   
  
He couldn't. He couldn't say it out loud, he couldn't open his mouth and say-  
  
"Yes, Blaine?"  
  
He looked up quickly and saw his father standing, hand on the doorknob, staring at him as he stood just outside the study. Blaine stood up straighter, wondering if he'd been the one to knock or if his father had opened the door of his own volition; his hand was at his side, so he suspected the latter. "I'm sorry, sir-"  
  
"Are you lurking for a reason?"  
  
Blaine swallowed hard and tried to remember any of the words of his speech, but he couldn't. He couldn't remember any of what he wanted to say except that he was terrified, and he knew that wasn't something to ever admit to his father. Of all the people in the world he wasn't going to admit fear to, it was the man who had told Blaine from birth that fear was the ultimate sign of weakness, all while fearing every person who might look at the family and see something unusual or  _exotic_.   
  
"Sir, if you have a moment, I wanted to tell you-..."   
  
 _that I'm sick._  
  
His father looked at him expectantly, eyebrows raised, face slack yet impatient. He seemed taller somehow, backlit by the lamp of his study, and it took everything in Blaine not to shift from one foot to the other or twist his neck to try and get out some of the nervous energy as he attempted to conjur up the words.  
  
 _that I don't think it's your fault but I can't be sure because I've felt this way for as long as I can remember but you've always been my parents so I suppose there's no way of figuring it out for certain._  
  
He wondered if this was how his father's patients felt; if that was all he would be to his father now. No longer a potential legacy, just another disturbed individual climbing the walls of the asylum and barely able to figure out who they were, let alone who they used to be. Not a family member, just a shell that fit nicely into a Christmas card photograph.  
  
 _that I tried to stop feeling this way but I can't._  
  
Why couldn't he say it?  
  
Kurt could say it. Kurt, who could defeat this thing if he tried hard enough but who seemed to either be incapable of trying, or didn't know he was supposed to, or was a "difficult case" who would let his pride stand in the way of getting better and live his entire life in misery.  
  
Blaine's heart ached at the thought. He wanted good things for Kurt  _so_  much, and those good things could never happen as long as Kurt was like this. It was a simple fact of the world.  
  
 _that I'm madly in love with my best friend and had a disgusting dream about him that was the most amazing thing I've ever even thought of and I can't possibly want to act on that and oh please god-_  
  
"that I appreciate you introducing me to your alumni friends while I was here," he finished breathlessly. His father looked mildly surprised, but it barely registered. "I should know about schools in the next two or three months, for sure, but I imagine their influence will do a world of good in vouching for my good character and work ethic. I appreciate the connections."  
  
His father nodded curtly. "Of course," he replied, his tone distant and disinterested even on the topic of school as he edged past his son to retrieve something from the kitchen, leaving Blaine feeling breathless and boneless against the wall.  
  
He'd lost his chance, and his nerve. Tomorrow Edgar would drive him back to school and he wouldn't be able to say anything unless he made a special appointment to come home and see his father. he was giving up the opportunity to get better for at least another three months, most likely, and in the meantime-  
  
He hated himself for not being stronger. After all, if he were stronger he wouldn't need help. If he were stronger, he could go back to being who he was a month ago and not feel like his entire body was going to explode if he kept going on like this.   
  
But mostly he hated himself for not being brave enough to stand up and do the right thing.  
  
It really was his own fault he was sick.


	19. Chapter 19

There were many things a person could accuse Kurt Hummel of, but stupidity was not usually one of them.  
  
Yes, he had made his share of mistakes in life, and he might even admit to having a hairbrained scheme or two at one time or another. He was at once too cynical about humanity and too optimistic about individuals, and he had a tendency to shoot off an icy response before he properly thought through the consequences. And he had even done a number of things that, in hindsight, could easily have turned into something much worse than they did.  
  
But even  _he_  could not be dumb enough to take romance or relationship advice from Rachel Berry.  
  
Her suggestion that he confront Blaine and track him down and refuse to allow him to run away seemed just this side of "completely insane", and he intended to stay as far away from that line as humanly possible. For one thing, if the guy had run away from just a kiss, Kurt suspected that any further pursuit would leave Blaine heading for the hills at breakneck speed. For another, if someone - say, Mercedes since apparently she had long harboured affection for him beyond what he realized - were to pursue him vigorously after the point at which he told her politely he wasn't interested, that would be rude. Even more rude if she kept after him after he literally ran away from her.  
  
That didn't make him feel much better to think about, realizing how much that meant Blaine must really not want anything to do with the idea of kissing him.  
  
The point, however, remained: you should treat the people you like with respect, and it would not be respectful to keep up a relentless pursuit when they said 'no.'  
  
And for another thing...again, this was Rachel. The girl who had practically stalked Finn while he had a girlfriend and made pretty clear he didn't intend to leave Quinn anytime soon. The girl who, if she could have? Would have assigned herself every duet with Finn for more than three years...and had actually come close to accomplishing that. The girl who was currently dating him because he was her only ticket out of town and because he couldn't be interested in any other girls. Not exactly a relationship expert.  
  
Also kind of completely insane.  
  
That being said, he didn't know that the advice Mercedes had heavily implied through most of the break was any better. She thought he should stop talking to Blaine alltogether. Back off. Learn to be happy on his own and secure in himself and not worry about what Blaine thought about any of it. That Blaine was potentially in a position to return his advances was irrelevant, she had said; the fact was, if he ran away that meant he didn't like Kurt back, so Kurt should just leave it alone and not keep being around him if he couldn't handle that.  
  
She also thought his analysis of why Blaine had been showing interest was ridiculous. She didn't say it in so many words, but the look on her face when she explained about the flirty songs and the touching and the genuine niceness and Blaine's inability to look away when he sang...it was pretty clear.  
  
To be fair, she wasn't entirely wrong; the dating arrangement with Rachel was precisely as insane as she made it out to be. Unfortunately it was also more necessary than she seemed to understand, so he was going to have to live with her confusion and mild disdain for now. Someday he might be able to explain it to her, just not yet.  
  
Which left the big question: If both of them were at least a little bit wrong, then where did that leave him? And, more importantly, what did that mean he was supposed to do?  
  
Obviously Rachel's advice had to go immediately. But not seeing Blaine was absolutely out of the question. Even just the couple weeks over break without seeing the boy on the way to class or at Warbler practice, he felt emptier - and not just because the butterflies he got in his stomach and the warm feeling that radiated up and down his entire body were gone when Blaine wasn't around. As much as he'd missed Mercedes and his dad and everything he'd ever known at the beginning of the year - missing Blaine was that five-fold.   
  
He missed asking Blaine about his day. Or seeing him at lunch and talking about how annoying the French teacher was being. Or feeling like there was someone he could go tell if he was having just one of those  _days_  who would let him ramble on about the frustrations of being stuck wearing a uniform or whatever other stupid thing was at the top of the pile of annoyances at that particular moment...and then make him feel better. He missed watching Blaine sing - and oh god, his  _voice_ -  
  
It wasn't about being in love with him. Well, a little bit, but it was more than that and less all at the same time. He missed Blaine because, with the possible exception of Mercedes, it was the best friendship he'd ever had. In some ways - and he hated to admit it because it felt like sacrilege - but in some ways it was a better friendship. Stronger. More accepting of who each other  _was_  instead of the playful attempts he and Mercedes had at making each other into the person they wanted the other to be.   
  
Even that wasn't entirely accurate, though, because Blaine had his moments. He had his times of telling Kurt to tone himself down and not talk about being like a girl in public and not-...not sing songs in male ranges, which how confusing was that? Because if he wasn't allowed to be like a girl in public, or at least wasn't allowed to talk about how much of a killing he would make running a translation service for all the hapless Dalton boys trying to impress girls for dates, why precisely was he required to be like a girl when it was just the two of them?  
  
He just didn't even know anymore. But it had been two weeks and he missed his best friend desperately.  
  
Which meant, he concluded, that nothing should change. Sort of. In a way, everything had to - no more flirting. No more...trying to pursue him. No more wistful glances across the commons during meetings or trying to find excuses for Blaine to touch his arm. No more duets, though that one might about kill him.  
  
But at the same time...seeing Blaine all the time. Getting to actually talk to him. Because even if Blaine didn't return the more-than-friendship feelings Kurt had...he at least wouldn't be repulsed by the fact that Kurt had feelings for another boy. And probably had had feelings like that himself at some point for another young man...who unfortunately wasn't Kurt, but he could learn to live with that. Maybe some things were more important than having a...a boyfriend right now. Maybe having a friend was worth more.  
  
And if it would keep him from losing Blaine entirely, he was willing to give it a shot. Especially because there was something he'd been wanting to share with Blaine for more than a week now, something he knew Blaine would love, and it had been driving him crazy in anticipation.  
  
He found himself milling around outside after his father dropped him off and headed back toward Lima again. He didn't care that it was barely 25 degrees out; his coat was warm enough, and the new navy, red, and Dior grey-striped scarf Carole had given him for Christmas was functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. After ten days of not being able to see the boy, ten  _long_  days of thinking to himself "Blaine would love to hear about..." or "Blaine would laugh at..." or "Blaine would hate the mushrooms on this..." - which was the point at which he knew this might be just the tiniest bit unhealthy...after ten days Blaine would theoretically be back within a fairly short period of time.  
  
He wasn't back already; Kurt had checked the dorm first thing. Unless Blaine was keeping his door locked now and refusing to answer knocks in case it happened to be Kurt at the door, but that seemed a little farfetched and potentially paranoid.   
  
Kurt had finally decided that maybe he needed to go inside when he saw a boy trudging across the quad with a suitcase - a boy clad in a coat exactly like Blaine's, with the same side-parted hair that seemed to glisten for all the product.  
  
His heart leapt as he tried to simply walk in Blaine's direction rather than run, unable to stop the grin that crossed his face. "Blaine! How was your break?" he called, trying to sound casual.  
  
Blaine froze. Of course Kurt would be the first person he saw. That was his luck. of course the person he least wanted to see, the person on campus who scared him the most, would be the one he ran into immediately upon returning.  
  
If he thought there was any way to run the other direction, he would have. If he had any common sense at all, he would have. The way his stomach twisted up in a knot when he saw Kurt meant he absolutely  _should_  have.  
  
...It was just that the boy was so beautiful.  
  
He smiled and it physically made everything in him ache - his chest, his stomach, his eyes, his cheeks, all burning as he tried to force himself not to care, not to want this thing that just kept creeping up on him, stronger and stronger every time. "Hey, Kurt," he replied weakly. "Okay, how was yours?"  
  
"Okay. It was uneventful, really, but good being home. Rachel was... _Rachel_ , but I got something you have to hear. You'll love it. Let me run to my room and get it, then meet you over in yours in a few minutes?"  
  
Blaine knew that he should have said no. He should have absolutely said no to Kurt being anywhere near his room, let alone in there, just the two of them, with music of some kind-  
  
But the word "Okay" was out of his mouth before he could stop it.  
  
Kurt beamed and clapped his gloved hands together excitedly before disappearing up the front steps of Everett House as Blaine trudged on to his own dorm, cursing himself all the way.  
  
This was a horrible idea. This was the last thing he should ever be doing. But how could he say no?  
  
He barely had time to get his coat off and set down his suitcase before Kurt was knocking on his door, clutching an album. "Mercedes gave this to me. It's this incredible new musical, it just premiered about six weeks ago. It's a lot closer to the old style than you like, I know you prefer West Side Story with all of the dancing and unusual orchestration, but I think this is just...there's something about it that just  _feels_  iconic already."  
  
Kurt's eyes sparkled even brighter when he got excited about something, Blaine noticed with a sad smile. He looked radiant talking about this new show, this soundtrack.  
  
He could resist this. He could be strong enough to say no. He'd said no in the Commons before the break, he could do it again now if anything happened - and he suspected it might because it was obvious what Kurt had wanted and he doubted that feeling had gone away.  
  
He forced a smile and said, "Then put it on. Mind if I unpack while we listen?"  
  
"Not at all," Kurt replied. He slipped the album out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. As the [first song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE7zsb7wLKQ) began to play, he perched himself elegantly on the edge of the bed. Blaine dragged his suitcase onto the bed and began to carefully empty its contents, doing his best to avoid direct eye contact with the boy on his bed; after all, that was how they'd gotten into trouble before.  
  
That had been his tell. And that had been Kurt's, too. If they could just avoid eye contact, they'd be fine.  
  
He could do this. He could be stronger than this  _thing_. He had to be; he couldn't tell his father until at least spring break, probably longer - his own cowardice had ruined his chances there, hadn't it? So in the meantime, he needed to just deal with things and handle them in as mature a manner as possible.  
  
Kurt seemed determined to thwart his chances of that, though. He kept asking question after question - all innocuous, all very friendly and not at all romantic in nature. About his break, his family, how the show with Jean had gone- But Blaine couldn't answer them. Not in more than one or two syllables. If he did...if he even tried...he would reveal everything, and that wasn't something he could do right now.   
  
But Kurt was right; he did like the music. He loved that it was a musical about music but in a different way than Music Man or one of the others. So many of the songs were about the power of song if you listened closely enough, about being swept away by beautiful melodies and losing track of time on a chorus's wings, and that was something he could definitely understand.  
  
He didn't understand the number about the goats. Kurt said it might be something they had to see to understand; Blaine hoped so, otherwise it was a really misguided creative decision. Though he was impressed by how Oscar Hammerstein had come up with so many rhymes for the word "goatherd."  
  
It was nearly forty minutes into the album when Kurt looked up from his now-reclined position against the pillows and offered quietly, "This one's my favourite, I think."  
  
Blaine had draped himself across the foot of the bed sometime during Kurt's technically stunning performance of the song about climbing mountains done entirely in falsetto, and he looked toward Kurt. "Really? Not the one with the solfege?"  
  
Kurt shook his head. "That one's fun, though for an upbeat number I think my favourite is Sixteen Going on Seventeen." He didn't add that he might have pictured it as a flirty duet between himself and Blaine immediately upon hearing it, only to grow sad as he thought about what the outcome of that would be. "No, [this one's](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5DWX-zubL4)...this one's special."  
  
He had listened to it easily a hundred times since Christmas Day, lying on his bed with his eyes closed, just...imagining. Picturing beautiful things that he didn't even know if they existed, but thought they might. Or that maybe he could make them exist, anyway, if he wanted them enough and could convince-  
  
 _An ordinary couple  
Is all we'll ever be  
For all I want of living  
Is to keep you close to me_  
  
They were simple images, really. Stupid, banal little things. Things that no one else would think of when they thought about dating someone, but he couldn't quite help.  
  
It was ridiculous, the more he thought about it, because really shouldn't he be picturing them...going on dates or being like another couple their age? Or something like that? But he couldn't fathom that. He couldn't fathom being like one of the teenage couples in town, they would never be able to do that. Not in a million years. But he could imagine...  
  
There were homosexual adults who had-...who were couples. Rachel's father and his roommate. Man #16 had someone he said he was in a "homosexual marriage" with, and while Kurt's initial thought had been that the idea sounded ludicrous, the more he thought about it...  
  
The more he could picture that for himself. Like what his dad had with his mom, or with Carole, only...not. Maybe.   
  
And something about the song just...made him believe it might really exist, was all.  
  
 _To laugh and weep together  
While time goes on its flight  
To kiss you every morning  
And to kiss you every night_  
  
He imagined them in the future. Ten, fifteen years older than they were now, in the New York apartment he had been imagining himself in since he was 10 years old. He imagined cooking dinner for them after they got home from work. He imagined waking up in the same bed - they would have the same bed wouldn't they? He imagined so, since Rachel's father and his roommate obviously didn't sleep in the separate bedrooms they had for appearances' sake.   
  
He could remember what it felt like, having Blaine sleeping beside him in his own bed back in Lima, and the idea of having that every single morning sent a shiver through him. He wanted that so much. More than anything else he could think of, more than getting out of Ohio even. More than performing on a Broadway stage to a thousand fans screaming his name. More than being a famous, successful designer like Christian Dior. More than anything he had ever wanted before in his life.  
  
He wanted it so badly he could practically feel the dip of the bed beside him and almost smell Blaine's aftershave. His eyes snapped open and he glanced to check if maybe he'd imagined it into reality. No; Blaine was still at the foot of the bed, listening with a sad look on his face.  
  
Maybe he was picturing it, too.  
  
 _We'll meet our daily problems  
And rest when day is done  
Our arms around each other  
In the fading sun_  
  
It was almost funny - his entire life, he had sworn the last thing he wanted when he grew up was to be stuck in the life his father had. He loved his dad, he appreciated everything the man had ever done for him and he understood the sacrifices that had been made to give him everything he could possibly have. But Kurt had never liked the realities of that life.   
  
And yet suddenly, that was all he wanted. Not here, not in this backwards state or that horrible town, not in the rambler house with its old furniture and tacky curtains and lawn that constantly needed mowed. But the warmth, the casualness, the love?  
  
For the first time in his life, he wanted to be ordinary; unremarkable in anything but the fact that the person he loved was another boy. Even then, that shouldn't be so remarkable. After all, if animals could do it...  
  
If it was possible to be like any other human being despite being homosexual, as the survey said, then it had to be possible to be like any other human couple, didn't it?   
  
He sang along quietly with the last part of the verse, staring longingly at the ceiling as he imagined Christmas celebrations with Blaine - with their elegant tree and stylish decorations, looking like something about of a 1940s holiday movie, hosting soirees with fascinating New York people and singing carols together.  
  
He couldn't imagine anything more beautiful.  
  
 _An ordinary couple  
Across the years we'll ride  
Our arms around each other  
And our children by our side  
Our arms around each other_  
  
Blaine wasn't sure whether it was the lighting or Kurt's voice that undid him. He wanted to say that it was the ethereal, almost cinema-style atmosphere as Kurt's face was bathed in a dusky glow from the west-facing window of his bedroom...but he had a suspicion Kurt's voice would have done the same thing to him even if it had been pitch black, leaving him unable to see the pale rosy cheeks or sparkling glasz eyes staring dreamily upward like Dorothy at the Kansas sky.  
  
 _An ordinary couple  
Is all we'll ever be  
For all I want of living  
Is to keep you close to me_  
  
His entire life, all he had wanted was to be ordinary. Normal. Unremarkable. That was what a person had to be to get by in the world, his father had taught him, and whatever he had to do to fit into that mold needed to be done. There could be no deviation - none whatsoever.  
  
Why couldn't he bring himself to want it  _enough_? Why couldn't wishing as hard as he wished make any of it easier? What was wrong with him that he couldn't fit?  
  
Except he'd never fit. Not really. He'd been able to fake the rest of it, but he'd never been able to actually feel the way he knew he was supposed to. Not about the stuffy, suit-clad robotics of every interaction with the fake laughter and pre-practiced questions and canned responses. Not about the emotionless, joyless, loveless family life he was going to be forced into one day whether he liked a girl or not. Not about the myopic view of college selection and university life, or the list of acceptable careers for his future.  
  
Not about singing. Not about performing. Not about being up there on stage, the only time he truly felt alive in his entire life.  
  
He wasn't supposed to feel any of those things, either.  
  
Maybe all of it was wrong. Maybe all of it was right.  
  
Maybe all of it was what would later be chalked up to that euphemistic catch-all of "misspent youth." Maybe everyone else used to feel the way he did, got it out of their system, and settled down into their happy-but-joyless little prepackaged lives. Maybe if he got this out of his system...if he got all of it out of him he could then relax a little and stop feeling so much.  
  
What did any of that mean for him? For being normal?  
  
 _To laugh and weep together  
While time goes on its flight  
To kiss you every morning  
And to kiss you every night_  
  
Kurt was back to singing along, so softly, so wistfully, as though his voice couldn't handle the amount of want he had for all of it to be true. As if it were just too much to even hope for, even in song where all things were meant to be possible. As if he couldn't bring himself to admit this was his dream.  
  
Blaine knew how that felt. He knew how it-...how it was to want something like this so badly but know it was wrong, but know it couldn't happen, but believe fervently it  _shouldn't_  happen.  
  
The sorrow in Kurt's voice as he sang...the longing...the  _want_  just- it did something to him. It struck something in him, pulled and twisted at some part of him that couldn't be put back again, and he didn't know how to look away. Not like last time, when it was because Kurt was positively entrancing with the way he sang and danced and flirted and flitted his way around the room. This was more like-...like if he looked away now it wouldn't just be the cause of unfortunate sexual frustration that was better than the alternative. It was like if he looked away now he would lose something huge that he couldn't ever get back.  
  
Something he needed desperately.  
  
It was so much more than mere want now, even as intense as that sensation had been. This wasn't just primal. It was like every part of him was being drawn out by Kurt's voice and he couldn't hold back anymore.  
  
Maybe this wasn't wrong. Maybe everything was wrong, including the music. How would he know unless he-...maybe-  
  
Before he knew entirely what he was doing, he had pulled himself up to his knees and moved across the bed, leaned in, and just...  
  
His left hand cupped Kurt's jaw as he bowed his head, pressing his lips against Kurt's softly, experimentally. He knew in theory what this was, but the practical realities were so far removed from anything he'd actually done that he wasn't entirely sure what he was meant to do. Instinct kicked in enough to make sure he kept breathing, but beyond that he was on his own, and Kurt wasn't moving or doing anything in return and ohdeargod what he had  _done_ -  
  
He started to pull back, then heard a sharp sudden inhale as Kurt's lips chased his the few inches he had retreated. He felt Kurt's hand slide up to the side of his face as Kurt suddenly seemed to awaken to the realization of what was going on, shaken from his stunned state of immobility by Blaine's attempt to end the kiss.  
  
Once Kurt followed, he didn't retreat again.  
  
 _We'll meet our daily problems  
And rest when day is done  
Our arms around each other  
In the fading sun_  
  
They broke apart slowly, mutually, and Kurt's head flopped back against the pillow, eyes wide with the shock of it all. It was surreal. Blaine had just-...Blaine had  _kissed_  him, had  _wanted him_ , and even though he had a thousand thoughts spinning around the only one he could latch onto was simple.  
  
Blaine had kissed him.  
  
Over and over and over again, each time feeling just a little lighter and higher and airier until he felt positively giddy. Blaine liked him. Blaine had kissed him. Blaine wasn't trying to run away from him. Blaine started this, Blaine wanted this,  _Blaine had kissed him_.  
  
Blaine flopped heavily on the bed beside him, swallowing hard. As he watched the grin spread slowly across Kurt's face, lighting up the boy's features, the realization hit him.  
  
He had done it. He had done it and had liked it more than he should have.  
  
It wasn't getting out of his system. It wasn't like when the urge to sing hit, and if he picked the right song he could channel it all and make the urge subside for awhile. All he wanted to do was press against Kurt again, feel their lips together, feel Kurt's soft hand against his face and hear him breathing like he couldn't remember how.  
  
He wanted this so badly and he didn't know how to stop.  
  
What was he supposed to do now?  
  
Feeling dizzy and desperate for something concrete, he reached out and grabbed the first thing he could get hold of - the shoulder of Kurt's shirt. Clumsily, he tried to pull it toward himself, and he felt Kurt's arm encircle him. He should have jumped away, demanded that Kurt leave, left himself until Kurt was gone, done something -  _anything_  - to reinforce to both of them that this shouldn't have happened and couldn't happen again but he-  
  
He couldn't bring himself to. He wanted to, but want wasn't even in the game anymore; now it was about  _need_ , and he  _needed_  Kurt.  
  
He flung his other arm around Kurt's waist, hands grappling for somewhere to hold as he clung, terrified of what he was and who he was becoming and all the things this beautiful boy made him feel, but unable to move away even a fraction of an inch.  
  
Kurt's arms tightened around Blaine, unwilling to let him escape again. Not when things could be as perfect and right as the feeling of Blaine's lips on his.  
  
 _An ordinary couple_  
Across the years we'll ride  
Our arms around each other  
And our children by our side  
Our arms around each other


	20. Chapter 20

Kurt had no idea what any of it meant.

He knew obviously that this meant Blaine liked him, which felt-...to call it "amazing" was woefully inadequate. He was left with cheesy, overwrought metaphors about the world seeming to explode with bright possibilities and vibrant colours he'd never known existed. He found himself wanting to hop up on the curbs of sidewalks around campus, singing as he twirled around lamp-posts like Gene Kelley. To stare dreamily out the window during class instead of paying attention to the lecture on the Norman Conquests and just imagine that perfect moment, the one where Blaine had leaned over in the middle of the most wistful, sad song about the loveliness of being ordinary and kissed him so softly...

He wasn't sure what kisses were meant to feel like, not for sure, but he was pretty certain that was it. At any rate, the kiss suddenly made him understand what all the fuss was about, which wasn't something he'd ever had before. It felt like the world's most amazing love song.

How many kisses came with their own crescendos? 

He smiled at the thought - he was doing that a lot, smiling seemingly out of nowhere. It took him the entire first day after Blaine kissed him (oh god, Blaine had kissed him!) to realize why it was that his face hurt before he realized it was because he'd been grinning this stupid, wide, ecstatic grin almost constantly since it happened. It took him another day to realize the reason that smiling could cause him that much pain was because his face literally wasn't used to it. 

He couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled for more than a few seconds at a time, let alone this widely. With this much actual joy behind it.

He'd never felt like this. The sort of aching bloom in his chest all the time, like his heart was literally trying to burst through his ribs because he felt so much. The way he was almost breathless just thinking the name "Blaine." Everything that had felt magical in the moment he watched Blaine sing the first time, and the second time when he put a name to how he felt - it paled in comparison to this.

Because not only was he in love with Blaine, but Blaine loved him back. Or at least came close to it - and would get there in time. 

Maybe. He thought so, at least. He thought it meant that he and Blaine were on the same page, felt the same way about each other, and were...

...What were they? 

That was the real problem, he concluded. He had no idea how any of this was meant to...work. He understood relationships, vaguely, in theory, and he'd certainly watched his share of matches - both good and bad - as a teenager who wasn't too busy being wrapped up in his own relationship drama to observe others in living out theirs. The years he'd spent watching Rachel and Finn and Quinn alone had been an interesting educational experience in how not to pursue someone, for example. Plus he was kind of the go-to for advice about boys, even though he didn't understand them much better than any of the girls who asked him. A little bit, but not entirely. So he had enough of an idea of the basic stages and milestones that a boy and girl went through when pursuing each other, when they started dating, but this...

...This didn't always line up to that, did it?

In some ways it did - or it could, he guessed, he wasn't entirely sure. But in some ways, it didn't seem to fit at all, and Kurt wasn't sure if that meant they were doing it wrong, or if it was something that was entirely different when both people were boys. For one thing, none of the rules applied. Boys were supposed to ask the girl out - how did that work with two boys? And boys paid for dinner. Was he-...he assumed he was supposed to be the girl, since Blaine was more like a normal boy than he was, but that felt odd for some reason. Not quite right. Even though Blaine had, he supposed, made the first move so he apparently did want to take that role. 

But so much of regular dating would be off-limits to them, wouldn't it?

Even if they weren't sick or wrong - and they weren't - that didn't mean other people would understand that. They couldn't walk down the street hand-in-hand like other couples could. He couldn't smile giddily as Blaine carried his books. They couldn't go to the movies like every other in town and kiss in the back like Finn and Quinn. They couldn't go out to dinner and flirt with each other because then-...then everyone would know. And if he wanted people to know, he wouldn't be fake-dating Rachel.

If he wanted people to know, it would be the sign of having a death wish.

Except he did want people to know. He wanted to shout it from the rooftops that he, Kurt Hummel, had a boyfriend.

If that was even the appropriate term.

Or lover, though that wasn't entirely accurate since they hadn't- there had been none of that yet and probably wouldn't be, though the thought of it was more confusing and intimidating than repulsive. 

Or...whatever it was Man #16 called the man he was with (who Kurt thought might be referred to as Man #16.5 from now on). The report had referred to it as a homosexual marriage, and before someone got married that made them a...boyfriend, right? So boyfriend. That's what this was.

Blaine was his boyfriend.

That grin was back, and he didn't care who saw it and gave him strange looks in the hall. Because he, the boy who had felt so alone and unacceptably eccentric for so long, had a boyfriend.

And really, who could not grin when confronted with that fact?

* * * * *

He didn't know what to do.

On one hand...mistakes happened. People slipped up sometimes, they did things they knew they shouldn't, they broke rules for no good reason, and usually all that happened was that, at worst, the person got caught and had to suffer the consequences. If they didn't get caught, then everyone just went on with their lives. 

Rather, it became a moral question more than anything else. If you stole something and didn't get caught, then it was up to you to figure out if you cared that what you'd done was wrong.

And Blaine cared. He knew it was wrong and that-...saying it bothered him wasn't strong enough. 

He couldn't stop thinking about it, that moment when he'd looked over at the beautiful boy beside him and had given in to every urge he'd been working for years to control. Every time he remembered it, remembered the look on Kurt's face when they separated, remembered the scent of his aftershave as he buried his face in Kurt's shoulder afterward, he felt a sharp flutter of his stomach, then nausea - disgust.

Then a kind of aching longing. He wanted to be normal so much, to not be sick, to not have ruined his chances at ever being a healthy person this way-

...but not as much as he wanted to kiss Kurt again. Not as much as he wanted to run his fingers through the boy's perfectly-coiffed hair and sing songs to him and hold him close.

* * * * *

He had taken to singing in the shower again. It was a habit he'd given up originally when Finn and Carole moved in. Unlike the old house, where he had his own bathroom far away from his dad's room, at the new house he and Finn shared a bathroom across the hall from their parents' room and it had come to his attention early on that his penchant for belting Broadway standards at an early hour was...inconvenient. Unappreciated by his housemates, at any rate.

When he started at Dalton, he had assumed that the edict against singing outside of Warbler practice still stood. Sam had a lot of studying to do, and when he got back to the room he usually wanted to just relax which didn't go well with the soaring sounds of Connie Francis. But now, with Sam off at an extra tutoring session in anticipation of their upcoming midterms - and by the way, who decided that it was a good idea to divide the semesters such that midterms fell three weeks after they returned from Christmas break? They couldn't have started a few weeks earlier, gotten out a few weeks earlier, and had exams right before the holidays rather than trying to get back into the swing of things for a week before buckling down to study like madmen in order to ace tests they didn't remember any material from? But that was its own digression entirely. With Sam at an extra tutoring session, Kurt found he couldn't help himself.

He sang when he was emotional. Usually he knew it as singing when he was brokenhearted, mournful...or so frustrated and angry he couldn't get out how he felt any other way. Now he was giddy, and it was either singing or skipping across campus and even he couldn't pull off the latter with any semblance of dignity.

I feel pretty  
Oh so pretty  
I feel pretty and witty and gay  
And I pity  
Any girl who isn't me today

He sang as he meticulously applied his Jheri Redding Creme Rinse Conditioner. He wondered if Rachel would at some point let him start recommending products for her - he did get some degree of clothing approval, he'd determined already. But even improving her garish ensembles wasn't enough if her hair was still frizzing out all over the place, and this worked wonders. He should ask the next time he talked to her.

He didn't talk to her often when he was back at school. For one thing, it was a little expensive to call Lima all the time, and he liked her but not quite that much. For another, there was always a line of boys waiting to use the phone. It wasn't the wait he minded; it was the audience. He couldn't talk to her about anything he actually wanted to talk to her about or tell her about without wondering the entire time if someone might be on to his less-than-brilliant-but-certainly-passable plan. He could act the part well enough when she was around, if he absolutely had to, and he was getting better at not laughing whenever Blaine would pointedly mention his girlfriend in front of a room full of people.

He would have to work on not staring dreamily at him now, wouldn't he? Probably. That might pose a problem.

He had written Rachel a letter to tell her about how everything had changed - a two-page long soliloquy on how beautiful Blaine was, probably, he honestly didn't remember exactly what he'd written but he knew he had talked about the kiss in there. She had probably gotten it a couple days earlier, and he was surprised she hadn't immediately called him to demand details. 

She would claim it was because she was a better actress than he was an actor, that she could keep up the front and not want to 'break character' as often as he did. She could jump in a lake; she wasn't the one head over heels for the most handsome boy in school.

He rinsed his hair with a dreamy sigh and something that sounded suspiciously like a giggle as he wondered if going with someone always meant you got to negotiate their clothes and hairstyle. He knew Quinn certainly told Finn what to wear often enough - "Match my dress like this," "don't wear that," "why aren't you wearing your letter sweater?" - but she was also kind of controlling and mean and he didn't want to be like that to his boyfriend. Besides, while Blaine didn't have quite his sense of style, he did seem to know how to dress himself out of uniform.

But his hair...Kurt was going to have to insist on washing all that Bryl out of it at some point and work it into something more lifelike instead of the hard plastic-like shell it was now.

I feel charming  
Oh so charming  
It's alarming how charming I feel  
And so pretty  
That I hardly can believe I'm real

He wondered what it would be like to run his fingers through Blaine's hair. Maybe lying on a blanket somewhere in a meadow, a picnic lunch open beside them, no one around for miles, just staring up at the blue overhead and watching the clouds roll by. He couldn't imagine anything more wonderful.

Actually, he could. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the same fantasy he'd had for his own life for what seemed like forever - a beautiful art deco apartment in New York City, where he would have an entire room for a closet and he could throw elegant soirees and invite women who dressed in Dior and Chanel, with a pianist playing in the background for everyone to spontaneously sing along to. But the addition to Blaine into the fantasy...his own Cary Grant in an elegant suit, a drink in his hand as he greeted their friends, welcomed them to their home, mingled charmingly through the crowd...then sang all evening because he couldn't help himself?

Who could want more than that?

But there was more, he concluded as he began to rinse his hair, closing his eyes as he tilted his head back under the spray. There could be more to life than just hosting elegant cocktail parties and working for a major design house, though those were important parts of what he ultimately wanted. There could be more in life than being alone, or being surrounded by couples without ever being part of one. 

He pictured quiet evenings at home in the same apartment, a soft jazz album playing on the record player because that was what people listened to when they sat around lounging on chaises and reading, wasn't it? Then Blaine would walk over to fix himself something to drink, and the music would stop. Kurt would sit up, looking away from his book to ask why Blaine had it off...only to hear whatever the new equivalent of "Unchained Melody" was at the time. And Kurt would smile, thinking about how romantic the song was, and Blaine would walk over and hold out his hand and ask him to dance...and there, in their living room, they would sway and dance and sing quietly along, holding each other close. And Blaine would reach his fingers up and run them through Kurt's hair in a way that Kurt would hate if anyone else did, but Blaine would be allowed to because he was special.

He would always be special. And with him Kurt felt special, the way Blaine looked at him? Like he wanted to hold back but he just couldn't because what they had together was so amazing, so strong? 

See that pretty girl in that mirror there  
Who can that attractive girl be?  
Such a pretty face,  
Such a pretty dress  
Such a pretty smile  
Such a pretty me!

As the water began to run cold, he realized just how long he had been standing there with his fingers working along his scalp and pretending they belonged to Blaine. He turned off the tap and stepped out of the blue-tiled shower, toes curling against the soft plush of the bathmat as he began to carefully dry himself from head to toe. He was getting ahead of himself, he reminded himself with a roll of his eyes and a sheepish, giddy grin. They had only been together for a few days now - maybe love songs and apartments were a little far off.

But a boy could dream, right?

He had spent most of his life expecting that most people would disappoint him, or people would die before they should, or people who appeared to like him and be nice to him would ultimately laugh at him behind his back. But Blaine...Blaine made him honestly think there might be something out there for him that could be amazing. More amazing than even what he'd pictured for himself, which was a very high bar.

And every time he thought of Blaine, that ridiculous smile came back and he felt warm all over and like his internal organs were floating and trying to burst out of him as if compelled by magnets to move closer to Blaine. 

I feel stunning  
And entrancing  
Feel like running and dancing for joy  
For I'm loved  
By a pretty wonder-

He was cut off by the sound of someone clearing their throat behind him, and he jumped and attempted to cover himself with the towel all in one uncoordinated motion. Sam stood in the doorway of their bathroom, glasses still on, looking amused and a little perplexed. "Sam," he said breathlessly, trying not to look nearly as embarrassed and flustered as he felt. "You're back early."

"Yeah," Sam replied, looking at the tile at the top of the wall. "Tutor had something tonight, I think his son plays basketball or something, so I came back here to work on stuff. Everyone's taking over the library because of midterms so it's kind of impossible to concentrate."

"Makes sense," Kurt stated, feeling the blush pinking his cheeks even as he stood a little straighter. "I'll just...be quiet then."

Sam gave a faint smile. "Yeah, that'd be good." He closed the door behind him as he went back to the room, and Kurt finished drying himself quickly before slipping into his silk robe and back into his fantasy world.

* * * * *

Blaine was convinced that it was a fundamental principle of life that, no matter who you were trying to avoid thinking about, they would be all you could think of. It was certainly shaping up to be the case for him about now.

He couldn't stop picturing Kurt. The way his eyes got really bright in certain light, at certain times of day. The way he flicked his hair back from his face. The way his voice sounded when he was trying to hide that he was nervous. The way he smelled, oh god, why couldn't he stop thinking about the smell of Kurt's neck when his face had been buried there after he gave in to an urge he'd been successfully resisting for years? Why couldn't he just stop thinking about him and go back to...whatever it was he'd been before? Why couldn't he just ignore the boy? Why was no amount of thinking about agonizing pain and feeling this anguish making any of it go away?

He'd always been able to push it aside before. What was wrong with him now that he couldn't stop wanting?

There was a knock at the door, and he dragged himself slowly out of bed, straightening his pajamas to make himself at least a little presentable. It wasn't that late, not nearly time to fall asleep - not even near curfew yet - but he didn't feel like being social. He didn't feel like going out and trying to force himself to pretend everything was fine, not right now. Not until he could get the way Kurt's neck smelled out of his head.

Which, of course, meant the person knocking on his door...

Kurt looked freshly-showered, his hair still damp and slicked neatly to the side, but he was dressed as elegantly as ever. He looked like a 1940s movie star like that, with the way he held himself so tall and upright and confident, but a split-second later Kurt broke into a grin. He leaned forward as if to kiss him, and Blaine panicked, practically pulling him into the room and shutting the door quickly behind him. 

Why didn't Kurt understand? Why didn't he get that this was something they weren't supposed to be doing? That just like he didn't want anyone to know if he screwed up an assignment or did poorly on an audition or something, he didn't want to broadcast this particular failure - to say nothing of the ramifications. Why didn't he get that this was something that they needed to be vigilant about, that if anyone found out their reputations would be ruined? 

But when Kurt grinned apologetically and said, "Sorry, I just...missed you..." his heart ached. And he found himself murmuring "Me too" even though he wished he hadn't.

Kurt leaned in again to kiss him, and behind the safety of the door Blaine found himself unable to pull away, unable to find any reason beyond the obvious to push Kurt away. Anything to hide behind, because apparently the obvious was no longer enough of a good reason to do what was right.

He felt Kurt's soft palm cup his cheek, the minty lips cover his, and his own hand moved up to Kurt's shoulder - not to push him away, just resting there. Pausing. He drew in a deep breath through his nose, and the scent of Kurt was just-...everywhere. Clean and fresh and innocent and Kurt and he couldn't move away.

He didn't step forward though. Didn't move to meet him, didn't pull him closer. 

It...it wasn't wrong if he let Kurt kiss him as long as he wasn't kissing back. As long as he wasn't initiating things. If he wanted but didn't advance, that still counted, right? It was still showing enough restraint that he wasn't entirely a lost cause, flinging himself with hedonistic abandon into something he knew was wrong. If he wasn't doing anything to- to bring this about, or to encourage him, or to start the kissing, then it wasn't his fault and didn't mean he was quite as sick.

...Did it?

Did it mean he was more sick if he'd been halfway wishing for this moment for days?

Kurt pulled back slowly, smiling and looking almost giddy as he slipped his had into Blaine's easily. The fluid movement felt like something that had happened a hundred times despite being new, and he wished it didn't all feel so damned easy. It would be so easy to just go with this, to let go, to let himself-

It would be wrong. It was wrong, no conditional tense. What they had already done was wrong enough, what he wanted to do was even more wrong, and this-

...This was unrepentant. This made him a difficult case. Wanting counted. Wanting mattered. Intent mattered. No amount of mental gymnastics could get him to honestly believe otherwise, no matter how hard he tried: wanting Kurt, and not pushing Kurt away, and not resisting anymore - that was just as bad as actively engaging.

Kurt was talking, but he couldn't focus on the words - just the feeling of the soft palm in his, the sparkling of his blue-green eyes, the excited melodic movement of Kurt's voice. Had Kurt always sounded like that? He seemed to recall something much colder before, something so much less excitable. More reserved. More appropriate than the near-giddiness he heard.

It was because of him, Blaine concluded grimly. Because of this. Not only was he getting worse, but so was Kurt - they were getting sicker the longer they were around each other, making each other so much more difficult, making all of this so much harder.

"...on Friday. If you're not doing anything."

He felt Kurt staring at him and realized he hadn't been paying attention. "What?"

"I thought we could get dinner. Don't worry - nothing overt," he added with a roll of his eyes, as if it was the funniest thing in the world to be worried about. "Two boys can get dinner together without anyone thinking anything, if that's what you're worried about."

"It's not," he replied quickly - too quickly. That wasn't what worried him. Everyone else knowing would be devastating, but it would only be the tip of the iceberg compared to everything else - the symptom compared to the cause. Everyone else knowing he was a pervert would mean the end of most of what he needed out of life, but it wouldn't hurt half as much as knowing it hurt him. There were no words a person could use that were half as harsh as what he thought of himself.

"Great," Kurt replied with a broad smile. "So we'll go. I thought somewhere nice, not the usual Dalton fare-"

He could imagine Kurt across the table from him, eyes shining in the soft light, in a ridiculous jacket that he wore with pride, elegantly picking at a fancy dish of some kind in one of the nicer restaurants around town- "I can't." His tone was firm, adamant, and he wasn't sure who he was trying to tell. 

Kurt's smile fell, and his eyes hardened into a near-glare. "Why not?"

Maybe Kurt really didn't know it was wrong. He still didn't know. Because the way Kurt acted about all of this, the way he didn't even try to fight it- But the idea of being the one to break that to him, to being the one to tell him how sick he was, how sick they both were, for even wanting this let alone how much worse off they were now by acting on it...

Crushing Kurt like that might be the right thing to do, but it wasn't something he was capable of. And it wouldn't stop his own problem. The other solution, while less honourable and far less courageous, helped save them both: backing away. Putting distance between the two of them, putting people between the two of them. Falling for someone else instead. That way Kurt wouldn't do these things because there was no one else to do them with, and he wouldn't do them because he would have someone else. It was the best of all worlds. 

Well. Not the best, but the less-horrible of all options.

"I have a date with Jean," he said, which wasn't entirely a lie. Rather, he didn't have a date with her yet, but he would once he called her first thing tomorrow after class. She had called him earlier in the week to ask how his break had gone, to let him know she was back at school and to not-so-casually hint that, should he want to take her out, she would still be interested. It was time for him to step up, to be the man in all of this, to do what was necessary. To be an adult instead of a frivolous child who pursued only his own desires. It was-...it was time to finally settle down and seriously date instead of waiting around and hoping this sickness would go away. It was time to be proactive.

"Really," Kurt said slowly, his eyebrows lowered. He was skeptical. Rather - he was skeptical of Blaine's motives, not of whether the date existed at all. Because he was fairly certain that Jean was not in on any of this - unlike Rachel, whom he was occasionally obligated to take out around Lima, showing her off for all the morons they used to go to school with to see that she was capable of getting a boyfriend and he was capable of wanting a girl on his arm. From the way Blaine said it, made it sound legitimate, it didn't seem like they had the same arrangement. And while they were nowhere near the point yet of going steady - did homosexuals even do that? Could boyfriends be 'steady'? Could they be anything other than steadies if there were only two of them in the entire world of a similar age and geographic location? It was hard to play the field when there was only one boy who might not reject his advances outright, he thought with twisted amusement - it felt like this was...different. More than merely having plans with someone else.

It felt wrong. It felt like lying. It felt like sneaking around and there was no sneaking in his fantasy. None. There was no- no skulking around in shadows and pulling each other frantically into rooms like Blaine had when he'd shown up at the door. There was only joy. No fear. No hesitation. No shame.

"Yeah," Blaine replied. "We're going out Friday. And maybe another time over the weekend. Sorry."

Now he was just making things up. No girl, even one as forward as Jean - perhaps especially as forward as Jean - had a date with the same boy two nights in one weekend. Ever. Not unless they were definitely steadies and even then. And Blaine and Jean had known each other less than six weeks.

This wasn't just deliberate, this was avoidance.

He was too proud to plead for Blaine to make room in his schedule, so testing the waters he said, "Then I should probably leave you to get work done - since you'll be busy all weekend."

And Blaine looked relieved.

He wanted to cry, to belt out the most mournful song he could as it felt like this boy he had adored from arms' length, then kissed and envisioned everything good in life with, took out his heart and crushed it under Jean's ugly high-heeled shoe. But he was too proud for that, too. His jaw, neck, posture all tightened as he slid his hand out from Blaine's gracefully. He managed a cold "Goodnight" before slipping into the hallway.

Blaine wanted to get rid of him. Wanted to shove him away and pretend none of it ever happened, that none of their kisses ever occurred, that they were something else - that he was something else.

Maybe Blaine really had been pretending he was a girl during "Baby It's Cold Outside". Maybe Blaine really didn't feel like this all the time and liked girls just as much, or more, or could like girls just as much or more. Maybe this boy he had worshiped and wanted so desperately to be with, to be like, was just an unrepentant jerk who didn't care about people, didn't care if he broke their hearts or their spirits or single-handedly wiped out every glimmering future dinner party they'd planned. Maybe he was a mean-hearted person under all that hair gel and that uniform and those eyes and that charming smile-

...maybe Blaine was scared.

His breath caught as he thought it, hurrying down the hallway back toward his own dorm. He remembered how terrified he'd been when he'd first found out what was wrong with him, remembered how scared Blaine had been in the car when they were even talking about it, how hesitant he'd been before the first kiss, how he'd run away before that, maybe-...maybe that was the problem. Maybe Blaine was just afraid.

But he didn't know how to help. Because if Blaine wanted to get away from him, wanted him to go away, how was he supposed to reach him? How was he supposed to explain to him that all of this was okay - more than okay, it was...it was amazing, it was beautiful...how was he supposed to show Blaine the future he could envision absent a crystal ball, if Blaine wasn't ready to see it?

How was he supposed to show Blaine what things could be or how this could go if he didn't really know it for himself, not for sure?

He needed to talk to someone, but his list of potential options was pretty limited. Exactly three people in the world knew his secret: one was currently either scared of him or hated him and was planning a date with a girl in a tacky uniform; one was still not entirely comfortable with the idea and thought he should just stay away from Blaine in the first place; and one...

...one may have been the worst giver of advice ever and the single least successful person in relationships he'd ever seen, but at least...at least she knew. At least she might be able to tell him something. Or just...listen. Or something.

When did he start needing to talk to people? He'd been the silent, solitary kid his entire life, why did he suddenly now, when things had to be such a carefully-kept secret, start feeling like if he didn't talk to someone he might crack?

He reached the hall phone and dug into his pocket, hoping there might be some kind of change in there. He retrieved a quarter and slipped it in, dialing Rachel's number. It was late, but probably not so late that she wouldn't be able to talk.

"Hello?" She sounded crisp on the phone, well-practiced, as though she thought at any moment an agent might be calling her and she wanted to make the best possible first impression. But the peculiarity was familiar and oddly comforting, even as much as he would have mocked her for it a year ago. Or might mock her for it again in a few days, when he didn't feel so confused and hurt.

"Hi, Rachel," he said quietly, but at least he managed to keep his voice tight so he didn't sound pathetic - just cold and tired, which he was.

"How are you? How's the new boyfriend?" she drew out the word teasingly, and he could hear the grin in her voice and it made him cringe.

"I don't know," he replied simply.

"I can't believe you didn't call and tell me - I had to read it in a letter days later. I need faster updates than that."

"There are people around," he pointed out.

There was a long pause, then a kind of forced brightness as she said, "Well then? I need updates now. We can speak in code. Or in famous movie quotes - people will just think you're a film buff. Or song lyrics, since you keep talking about how the Warblers are the hit of the school so obviously Dalton must appreciate musical talent, and you can't be truly talented unless you also have an extensive and in-depth knowledge of a wide variety of musical styles and genres-"

He wasn't sure why the upbeat tone in Rachel's voice made him feel so much more exhausted than he had only a few minutes earlier. Maybe she was going so fast he was getting tired just listening to her and trying to keep up. Maybe it was because everything seeming okay and holding it all together felt so dim in comparison to the brightness, the excitement with which she wanted to know every detail.

Maybe it was because he was starting to feel like there were no details worth revealing. He'd made up everything in his head again, hadn't he? Made up an entire relationship, an entire future, based solely on one kiss - one amazing kiss, but still just...just one kiss. He did this - every single time, he did this. And just once he wanted-

"I'm always chasing rainbows," he quoted, glancing up and down the halls to see if anyone was going to think it was strange to be speaking in lyrics, anyone who could put any of it together. That the quote came from a song done by Judy Garland was more painful than comforting - he could imagine Blaine watching him with rapt fascination while he sang it, seated on Blaine's bed and pouring his heart out because he didn't know how else to explain this feeling of everything he wanted being torn away like this. He skipped a line, then added, "My schemes are just like all my dreams - ending in the sky."

"What happened?" she asked before remembering there might not be a lyric that would tell precisely the story. "Did something not work with Blaine, is it-"

"I don't know," he stated. Because he didn't. He didn't know how this was supposed to go, or what he'd done wrong, or how exactly he was supposed to fix things now. He knew he needed to, he knew that clearly Blaine was afraid and confused and conflicted...but so was he. And he was doing an okay job of helping himself, but anything beyond that he wasn't sure how to approach. "I don't know how it's meant to work, but clearly this isn't it."

There was a long pause, then an almost tentative, "Do you want to...I don't know if it would help, but when I saw my dad over break, I mentioned you. If you wanted to meet him..."

The prospect of meeting someone else - someone like him, someone who knew how this went, someone who had a homosexual husband - or lover or whatever word it was they actually preferred because he somehow doubted that Rachel was trustworthy on this question - and therefore obviously had figured out how to breach all of this at some point...someone he could ask all of the several thousand questions that had started swirling around him so quickly he could barely think of anything else- a sigh of relief escaped at even the thought of it. "Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yes, Rachel. For someone who tends to be invested primarily in herself, that's a surprisingly good idea." But even through the backhanded compliment, he couldn't help but smile and stand a little straighter. 

"Thank you," she replied; she didn't protest the first half of the sentence, probably because she didn't see it as a bad thing Kurt realized with a fond roll of his eyes. "I'll call him. Would Friday work? They usually-"

"Friday's perfect," he replied. No way was he going to sit around his dorm on Friday and think obsessively about Blaine and his ridiculous non-fake fake date. With a girl. 

"You can pick me up after classes," she stated. "Besides - it's about time you met your girlfriend's father, isn't it?" She added dramatically, "You should tell the boys at that school that, too. They'll appreciate it and it will seem more realistic. Pretend to be afraid of him, though, even though he's bookish and entirely unintimindating. Most guys would be nervous before meeting the parents, especially of a girl as exceptionally talented as I am who would obviously be her parents' pride and joy. Assuming her father hadn't left almost a decade ago to live with his secret male lover."

The ridiculousness of it, and how over the top Rachel was when she made speeches like that, still couldn't take away his excitement and defiance. Blaine could have his pathetic attempt at normalcy on Friday. He would be having dinner with two men who had found each other and found happiness together as proud homosexuals, and then he would drop his knowingly-fake girlfriend off at home and come back to school...where he would teach Blaine everything he was missing.

And then he would get his future back, with all of its dinner parties and happy evenings at home. So help him, he would.


	21. Chapter 21

Hiram Berry lived in a modest, largely nondescript ranch house in Olmstead Falls, about twenty minutes from Cleveland and close enough to the airport that there was the occasional dull roar of a jet overhead.  As Kurt walked up the well-kept front path, Rachel half-clinging to his arm and chattering excitedly away, he glanced up at the sudden sound of the engine.  From here it seemed as though he could, if he had a long enough rope, lasso the wing and be carried away to whatever exotic location the plane was going to.  He stared longingly up at it the way he had since he was younger, wondering where the rich and important people on that plane were going.  Maybe New York.  Maybe somewhere even further, beyond even the reaches of his overactive imagination as a place he might go someday - London.  Paris.  Milan.  Most likely, judging by their location in relationship to Cleveland Hopkins Airport, it was going to Los Angeles or somewhere equally warm and ritzy.    
  
For the first time in Kurt's life, his actual destination almost seemed more interesting.    
  
He was nervous, a little queasy, as Rachel led him up the front steps and rapped on the door.  "In the spring these will all be rose bushes," she stated, her fingers curled around his bicep while her other hand rested on his forearm.  "All white.  We used to have them at home, but my dad was the only one who ever tended them.  He's not great in the garden, but he enjoys it.  My mom hates it, says it takes up too much time she could be devoting to shepherding her talent."  She paused a moment, glanced over at him, and squeezed his arm just a bit.  "You're going to love them."  
  
He wasn't sure if this was what Finn felt like the first time he'd gone to meet the Fabrays.  Probably not, he concluded, since this wasn't an actual date and he wasn't really taking out Mr. Berry's little princess, but in a way the stakes tonight seemed even higher.  This might be his only shot, at least for awhile, and if this didn't go well - if they didn't like him, if they didn't want to talk to him and tell him the intimate details of their life...and he couldn't say he would blame them for that, but if they didn't, then what was he supposed to do?  Because he needed to figure out what he was supposed to do now that he knew who he was, and if the only people around who might be able to help him ultimately  _couldn't-_  
  
The door opened to reveal a slight forty-something man with round glasses and very little hair.  He wore a brown polo shirt that practically hung off his narrow frame and seemed to almost shrink on himself just standing there, even in the threshold of his own home.  A sort of unassuming, forgettable fellow, he appeared nothing like his daughter who prided herself on being the center of attention - or his ex-wife who was much the same.  But he seemed pleasant enough, a soft smile appearing as he saw his daughter standing before him.  "Rachel.  Please come in."  
  
They hadn't made it fully into the entryway before Rachel began the introductions.  "Kurt, I'd like you to meet my father, Hiram Berry.  Dad, this is Kurt Hummel- my fake boyfriend," she stated proudly.  When Mr. Berry glanced at Kurt inquisitively, Rachel explained, "Kurt's a homosexual.  You probably a have a lot in common, and I thought the least I could do - as his devoted girlfriend," she added with an exaggerated wink, "was to introduce him to you.  And to Leroy."  
  
Mr. Berry fidgeted but extended his hand.  "Nice to meet you, Kurt."  
  
"Nice to meet you too," he replied automatically, though 'nice' didn't begin to cover it.  Intimidating.  Immense.  Incredible.    
  
And yet at the same time, it felt...strange.  Awkward. As though he had no idea what he could even ask about, where to begin.  Mr. Berry didn't seem to be the kind of person who would volunteer information freely, in stark contrast to Rachel, and if that meant Kurt would be responsible for steering the conversation...it wasn't so much that he was uncomfortable asking these sorts of intimate questions, though he was; mostly he just didn't know enough to know what to ask in the first place.    
  
He felt gauche, even standing in a home that was neither large nor intimidatingly perfect on its own.  He recognized a few paintings and posters that seemed like they matched or coordinated with things in Rachel's house, as though Mr. Berry had been allowed to keep one piece from each set as a token when he left.  It looked like a fragment of a life, like a tiny consolation hung in too big a space to make it seem like it fit, and he wondered suddenly if that was what he was doomed for.  If the best he could hope for was a single painting where there should have been six.  
  
"How've you been?" Hiram asked Rachel, glancing awkwardly between her and Kurt as though he wasn't sure whether he was supposed to be asking Kurt questions or not, whether he should be treating this like any other date or not, and Kurt didn't have any better answers for him.  He had begun reading etiquette books cover to cover when he was six, determined to succeed in any potential future dinners, but somehow this felt more like a cross between a meeting of a secret society and being a third-wheel at a family gathering.    
  
"Well," Rachel said excitedly.  "Auditions for Oklahoma are next week, so I've been practicing the dream ballet.  I think if I can incorporate that into whatever other audition piece I select, it will really give me a leg up on the competition."  Kurt had a mental image of Rachel breaking midway through her 16-bar vocal audition to perform a dance and barely restrained himself from laughing, because that would absolutely be something she would do.  He should suggest it, then find a way to sneak in and watch the director's face.    
  
That might be a little mean, especially considering what she was doing for him.  It wasn't easy going from rivals to friends-ish to steadies even if they both knew the last one wasn't entirely true.    
  
"I love that piece," Mr. Berry said with a bit of a dreamy expression as he seemed to hear it playing in his head, fingers moving slightly in tiny conducting motions as though a miniature orchestra sat just beyond the front hall.  
  
"I remember," Rachel replied with a faint, sentimental smile.  "I remember sitting on your lap and listening to it, then making you play it again so I could dance to it.  You said I was perfect, even though I couldn't even do a proper arabesque yet."  
  
Mr. Berry looked stricken, though Kurt wasn't sure whether it was because he was surprised that Rachel remembered such a thing or at the idea that she had said something about herself and her abilities was imperfect, even in retrospect.  Kurt was certainly more surprised by the latter.  But he moved on quickly to ask, "Can I get you two anything to drink?" as he led them toward the living room.  
  
The room looked surprisingly normal.  Kurt wasn't entirely sure what he'd been expecting, but for some reason this wasn't it - the same wood paneling as in his old house, the same sliding glass door out to a cement patio, the same square-edged furniture that almost everyone's family had in their living room including his own.  The combination of greys and golds was one he liked in his wardrobe but found almost uninspired in the decor.  Not something he would have selected if he had his own home to style however he wished.  
  
He wasn't sure why he'd expected otherwise.  Maybe because in his fantasies about what it was like to be an adult - a homosexual adult with his own life and another homosexual adult around - his home would look far less pedestrian and conventional.  He had expected Rachel's father would be the same, but maybe he should just have been glad that Rachel's affinity for plaid wasn't hereditary as far as he could tell.  
  
There was a [print](http://eleventhstack.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/douglas3.jpg) hanging above the long gold couch; it stood out instantly, seeming to jump off the wall and shout "look at me, I have vibrant colours!" - violets and lilacs and deep blues contrasting against the light ochres, with strong intersecting lines and geometric shapes.  It looked nothing like the rest of the house, nothing like Rachel and certainly nothing like Mr. Berry - it was too bold.    
  
"Kurt?"  
  
"Water's fine," he replied absently, studying it.  It wasn't the type of art he was usually attracted to - truth be told, he wasn't much for classical visual arts in general; he responded much more strongly to the audio than to the visual with the exception of fashion.  But there was something intriguing about it, about its relationship to the rest of the house-  
  
"Please don't say you think it looks like the Emerald City," said a new voice from behind him, and Kurt turned suddenly to find himself face-to-face with a black man he didn't recognize - presumably the infamous lover.  The man was taller than Mr. Berry and dressed neatly in a pink shirt, tie, and grey flannel suit that accentuated and elongated his lean frame.    
  
Kurt didn't know what to say to the request.  "I-..."  He found himself staring a little, looking the man up and down for any sign that he might have more in common with him than he did with Mr. Berry.  Obviously the most important thing was shared, he knew that much, but it still felt off-putting.  He didn't feel the kind of instant kinship he'd thought he would, the kind he shared with Blaine.  While the hesitance and slight discomfort felt like certain conversations with Blaine where conversations got too personal, too focused on their mutual proclivities, everything beyond that felt like...well, like any other meeting of a friend's parents.    
  
"Well it does," Mr. Berry protested, and when he walked back in there was something different about him.  He seemed less awkward and stiff than when it was just himself and Rachel standing there, less restrained.  There was a fondness in his voice and just a bit mincier step in his walk - slight enough that Kurt wondered if he was just imagining it, trying to project something there that would link the two of them together where there was nothing.    
  
Leroy shot a fond smile and a roll of his eyes over his shoulder, then turned back to Kurt.  "At least once a week he has to say that's what it looks like," he stated.  "We've had it for four years."  His voice was deeper than Kurt's but he spoke from his head more than from his chest, with a feminine, almost-lilting pattern that felt instantly familiar.  He held out his hand.  "Leroy Washington.  And you must be Rachel's infamous non-boyfriend."  
  
"Yes, sir.  Kurt Hummel."  
  
Mr. Berry waited until the two had shaken hands before he pressed a tumbler of water into Kurt's palm, then handed a glass of wine to Leroy.  The linger of his touch on Leroy's arm and the faint, private smile between the two of them - part appreciation but not just for the drink, part as though they were sharing a wonderful secret of something they were about to initiate Kurt into, all wrapped in genuine fondness - was subtle enough to go unnoticed by most.  
  
To Kurt, it spoke volumes he could never adequately express.  
  
* * * * *  
  
It was normal to be nervous on a date, Blaine told himself as he got dressed.  Plenty of boys were nervous before they took a girl out.  Maybe not most of the boys he knew, but considering most of them didn't actually pay much attention to the girls they took out...and maybe they were all nervous and he just didn't know it because guys didn't talk about things like that.  Especially if they genuinely liked the girl they were taking out and wanted her to have a good time - not Jeff or Nick or Bill or a few of the others, who took girls out just to feed their own egos and hopefully get to make out at the end of the night, but the boys who liked girls the way he liked Jean.  
  
And the reason he was nervous definitely didn't have anything to do with the dream he'd had last night - the one that started with Kurt kissing him, then moved quickly into Touching, then ended with him needing to change his sheets when he woke up.  The one that had him scrubbing his skin as hard as he could in the hottest shower he could manage to get at Dalton at 4:30 in the morning and left him unable to return to sleep when he was done.  
  
The one that made him feel so warm and happy it disgusted him.  
  
He tightened his tie and plucked his blazer from its hanger in the closet.  Kurt would critique it, he was sure - would tell him not to wear this shade of grey and not to pair it with the red in the tie, or would tell him to pick different shoes, or something, and he wished he didn't care.  He wished he didn't give a damn what Kurt thought, what Kurt wanted him to do.  Why did he care anyway?  It wasn't Kurt's date to go on.  It was his.   _He_  was going out with  _Jean_  tonight, and Kurt could get the hell out of his head right about now.  It was none of Kurt's business who he dated.  
  
Kurt hadn't stopped by his room in days.  Had barely talked to him between classes or at rehearsals.  Maybe dating was a good thing for everyone involved: He could go be happy with Jean, and Kurt could just...move on.  Stop fixating on him and be less sick.  
  
He hoped it worked both ways.  
  
Pushing the thoughts aside and selecting a different jacket, he hurried out to his car.  His palms sweated as he reached into his pocket for the keys, fumbling with the door.  This wasn't something he had done much of before, and he wasn't very good at it.  He knew that from the get-go.  He had no idea what to do on a date or how to act beyond what basic societal edicts and etiquette taught him.  He knew how to be a gentleman; he hadn't the faintest clue how to be a boyfriend.  
  
It didn't help that his number one coping mechanism, acting out how he felt through song, was off the table.  It was probably not acceptable to jump up on a table and start singing declarations of love and to Jean's beauty.  At least not during dinner.  Though she would probably appreciate it, knowing that she loved and understood music as much as he did.  Very few people in the world could probably appreciate that kind of gesture like that - himself, Jean, Kurt, and Rachel.  
  
At the thought of singing that kind of song to Kurt, that kind of declaration of how he felt and wanted to stop feeling as soon as humanly possible, he swallowed hard.  He imagined scratching out the boy's name from the list, scribbling over it again and again with thick black pen lines until it was nothing but a mess of dark ink between the names of two attractive, assertive,  _appropriate_ women.   
  
Much better.  
  
He started the car and began the short drive over to Crawford, wondering just how many giggling girls he would have to endure on the way to pick her up.  
  
* * * * *  
Dinner was awkward.  It would have been quiet and awkward were it not for Rachel, which came as no surprise to anyone there.  Unfortunately, what she contributed by keeping the table from not falling into uncomfortable silence, she made up for by making the entire table  _uncomfortable_  as she attempted to play the perfect matchmaker.  
  
"So Kurt, did you know that my dad once met the understudy for the role of Nettie in the Original Broadway Cast of Carousel?" she asked over the first few bites of casserole.  "He was working as an accountant to the stars...well, as many stars as we can get in Ohio, anyway," she added, dropping the flourish as if it suddenly occurred to her that maybe there weren't any actual stars around.  "But with a job like that, and being around those kinds of incredibly talented and driven people, is it any wonder he signed me up for dance lessons the next week?"  
  
"Actually that was your mother's decision," Mr. Berry replied awkwardly.  "She wanted to earlier, but the earliest the class would let you in was five."  Leroy and Kurt exchanged hesitant glances across the corner of the table; watching family squabble was painful.  Watching family too distant to know how to fight try to forge a connection was excrutiating.  
  
He had to ask.  He had so many things he wanted to find out, things he  _needed_  to know if he was ever going to be remotely okay, and this might be his only chance.  For one thing, one of his first questions was how to find other people and there was no way to ask that if you didn't have other people  _first_ , and they were the only ones he had any connection to, any in with.  But at the same time, was it appropriate to just bring up a person's intimate relationships over dinner? It felt too personal a conversation to have over a dish containing macaroni.  Was it something he should save for later, get their address and begin writing them instead?  Or could he ask them?  
  
Could he speak any of the words he wanted to out loud without either blushing or crying?  Was there any way to have this conversation even if he thought it was appropriate?  
  
But he needed to know.  For himself.  For Blaine.  For the two of them and what they might be and what they  _could_  be, if only they knew where to aim themselves as they moved and grew.    
  
"I don't know what to call him," he said abruptly, cutting off Rachel's question about something involving bone structure.  Everyone turned to stare at Kurt, Rachel looking more confused than any of them, and he tried to explain, "There's a boy at school.  We're together all the time, we do things together, we kiss, but we...I don't know what to call him."  
  
Hiram looked stunned, but Leroy smiled broadly.  "You like him?" he asked with a tone that made clear he knew the answer.  Even so, Kurt felt blush spread over his cheeks and a grin creep across his face.  
  
He more than liked Blaine.  He loved Blaine like he hadn't loved anyone except his parents, even other people he considered family.  He ached when Blaine didn't look at him during rehearsal and he wanted to just be as close as humanly possible to him when they were in the same room.  He felt incomplete if he didn't see Blaine during the day and he wanted to share every single piece of the world with him, all day, all the time.  "Yes," he  finally replied quietly, the word encompassing as much as it possibly could but still not enough.  "Very much."  
  
"And he likes you?" Leroy prompted.  
  
"Are you sure he likes you?" Hiram amended, casting a nervous glance at Leroy.  
  
"He's more cautious than I am," Leroy informed Kurt before directing at Hiram the statement, "If you'd waited until you were sure I liked you, we would still be waiting in apartments and watching for the other to walk by in a red necktie."  
  
"Red ties?" Kurt asked.  
  
"It's a code," Hiram explained.  "In some places, at least.  To know who's...safe, and who isn't.  A lot of people aren't, you know, even if you think they might be.  Even if they seem like they could be."  
  
Rachel covered a laugh.  "Kurt's school is private, they all wear red ties - well, red and blue striped."  
  
Leroy's eyes lit up.  "It's all-boys?"  Kurt wasn't sure what to make of his enthusiasm.  It felt a little...lecherous, and he remembered what the book had said about homosexuality being comorbid with inappropriate contact with young boys.  A part of him had instantly liked Leroy, but maybe this wasn't the best idea.  "That's fantastic - for you, I mean," he added quickly, seeing Kurt's nervous expression.  "All-male environments tend to be a little higher percentage of us than elsewhere."  
  
Kurt was skeptical.  "Really."  Because from what he'd seen of the football team, of Finn's group of friends, of pretty much every male-oriented group he'd ever been in, they were the most likely to call him out for being a sissy.  He highly doubted they were all secretly attracted to him.  
  
"I was in the Navy during the war," he replied.  "That was where I first really...I mean, I knew.  I knew when I was your age - younger, actually.  But I couldn't find anyone before that.  Not in college, certainly not in high school.  It wasn't easy, the Navy had rules and we were in separate quarters from the white sailors," he added with a roll of his eyes at the antiquated policy.  "But there were places on-base out there where you could find someone any time, day or night.  It wasn't the smartest thing, maybe, but I was 24 and it seemed like good fun."  Hiram looked queasy and nervous even hearing the story, and Leroy chuckled.  "That was one of the few good things about being there, you're just jealous."  
  
"Of anonymous trysts with old men? Not hardly," Hiram replied with a high, tight laugh, and Leroy shot him a judgmental look that Kurt didn't quite understand but reminded him of watching his dad and Carole attempt to not-fight in front of he and Finn.  Not about anything serious, but knowing exactly what the other was going to try to say before it came out.  
  
"I'm not advising that - certainly not  _here_ ," Leroy cautioned Kurt.  "The last thing I want to do is tell you something that would get you in trouble.  Something that could get you hurt.  I know people are more open now than we ever used to be, even than  _I_  would be comfortable with and I'm eternally too open for Hiram's tastes, but you have to be careful."  
  
That much Kurt knew almost instinctively. "Yes," he confirmed.  "So how do you..."  
  
"What?  Know if he likes you?"  
  
"No," he said slowly, considering his words carefully.  "He likes me.  He's made that much - though nothing else - perfectly clear.  But what do you do...after that?"  Because obviously at some point you got  _this_ , a house and a man you lived with, though hopefully without a child or two from a sham of a marriage.  But what came in between?  He doubted this was the next step?  
  
"Talk," Hiram replied with a fond smile in Leroy's direction.  "I used to go to his apartment and we would sit in the living room and talk on a Saturday night until the sun was coming up on Sunday.  About everything.  Anything.  About music, and plays, and art..."  Kurt couldn't help but sigh happily at that - he and Blaine did that.  Not staying up that late, they had curfew, but talking about everything like that, until hours had passed without notice.  In the Commons, in his room, in Blaine's room if Sam was around or they wanted the record player, in the dining hall, just...everywhere.    
  
"And sometimes more," Leroy replied with a faint nostalgic smile.  When Hiram coughed and had to take quick gulps of his water, Leroy quickly clarified, "Going places.  Nowhere-...here's the thing, Kurt.  You can go places with each other, you just have to be careful where you go  _together_.  You can live in the same home, just not  _together_ , not to anyone who doesn't already understand.  You see?  So we could go get dinner at a restaurant in Columbus where plenty of bachelors dined, we just had to act like we weren't...unsavoury characters," he offered with a look of disdain as though the euphemism was the nicest thing he could come up with that people had said about them.  "But if there are other people - other people like you, or like us - around, then it's safer.  Some cities have restaurants, Columbus had a bar for awhile."  Kurt remembered the article he'd read about the state liquor board trying to shut down the bar for catering to homosexuals; the idea of an entire bar full of people like him was almost enough to make his head spin as he suddenly realized what that would be like - a whole room of boys talking to other boys, but not like the Warblers.  Not like Dalton.  Like...like this, like this dinner, but without Rachel because she wouldn't be allowed into a homosexual bar.    
  
The idea of walking into a place and knowing that there were others like him there, just  _knowing_  because it was right there in the place's name or clientele, was at once exhilarating and terrifying.  He'd never been around anyone like himself, even aside from the issue of sexual so-called deviance.    
  
"You shouldn't be telling him this," Hiram stated.  "He's young.  Remember how foolish you were at his age?"  
  
"Not nearly as foolish as you were, getting ma-" Leroy cut himself off and changed tactics.  "There are some places with a lot of people.  That means safety.  That's where you want to go - not here.  Here's horrible.  Here means constantly watching over your shoulder and Hiram telling me to walk ten feet from him at all times in public."  Kurt looked over at Rachel's father in surprise.  He couldn't imagine telling Blaine such a thing.  For that matter, even as uncomfortable as Blaine was with him these days, as much as Blaine wanted to try to date Jean instead, he couldn't imagine Blaine ever telling him such a thing either.  "It's not his fault," Leroy tried to explain, glancing over apologetically.  "He comes by his paranoia honestly, and people are...cruel.  Or they can be.  It's not easy.  It's not nice.  But we have so much here.  This home is enough."  He looked over at Hiram again, and though neither of them moved from their places at the head and foot of the table, the glance that passed between them felt like an embrace.  It felt like holding hands and being close and warm and loving to one another though neither of them moved.  
  
As long as he could have that much in public, Kurt could live without the rest he concluded.  If he could have Blaine looking at him like that, he could surrender everything else.  
  
But still, he didn't understand.  "Why not go somewhere with people, so it's safe?"  
  
The two men glanced at each other, then Hiram glanced at Rachel before glancing back.  "I didn't want to go too far," he stated finally.    
  
"Because of me?"  It hadn't occurred to Kurt until that moment that Rachel hadn't spoken since this part of the conversation began, and he realized it was probably the longest she'd ever gone without speaking.  He wasn't sure if it was because she was uncomfortable and didn't want to think about her father and his attractions, if it was because she was being ignored and knew no amount of attempted attention-grabbing would distract them from the important topic at hand, or if she was genuinely more interested in helping Kurt get information; he suspected it wasn't the latter, but he was grateful anyway.    
  
"Yes," Hiram replied quietly.  "Not once you started coming up here.  I- I know I couldn't stay, but at least now..."  
  
Rachel nodded slowly before glancing at Kurt nervously.  "We're going to New York at the end of next year," she stated.  "We're going to be stars on Broadway, legends in this new Golden Age."  Kurt was about to ask why in the world she was stating this when it occurred to him:  What if New York wasn't one of the safe places?  Was he going to have to make the same kind of choice between safety and his dream the way Mr. Berry had?  What kind of choice could that possibly be?  And if he did choose somewhere safer over the glimmer of the Broadway footlights, what did that mean for Rachel?  For their arrangement?    
  
For that matter, what did it mean for Rachel if New York  _was_  safe? If he didn't need a fake girlfriend anymore because he could walk down the street proudly hand-in-hand with his actual boyfriend?    
  
(Boyfriend, he concluded, was definitely the right term.  For now at least.)  
  
"New York is safe," Leroy assured him.  "There are a lot of us there.  Anywhere on the coasts, or so I hear.  I know a lot of sailors settled out west after the War.  But New York...you should be okay there.  You and the boy you like," he added with a teasing wink as he stood.  "Who's ready for dessert? I made cake."  
  
It was nothing like he'd envisioned - no grand soiree, no elegantly-decorated apartment, no big city, no fabulous and cultured friends to share the night with.  There were no appetizers or cocktails, no stunning gowns or handsome men in tuxedos, not even so much as a single song played on a grand piano in the living room.  But Kurt had never seen anything he wanted so much, nor anything so beautiful.  
  
  
* * * * *  
  
Dinner had gone suitably well, Blaine concluded as he and Jean walked slowly through the park across from Crawford's grounds.  It was a heavily-patrolled area, she claimed, such that anyone who hung out in cars was reprimanded and strictly punished if it happened more than once.  But walking around in plain sight, provided one didn't stop to tarry too long on a bench or attempt to sneak off beyond the well-lit footpaths, was perfectly acceptable.    
  
"You're sure you're okay?" Blaine checked.  It was a chilly evening but not bad at all for late January in Ohio, but he had the benefit of long trousers while Jean was in a skirt and heels.  
  
"Fine," she replied with a sly smile as she fluffed the fur collar of her coat.  "But it's sweet of you to ask."  She held onto his arm as they walked, her hand resting in the crook of his elbow as they moved slowly along the path.  "So what does your week look like?"  
  
He had a hunch, based purely on previous interaction, that she was asking for purposes of arranging another date without being the one to expressly arrange the next date.  "I would love to take you out again," he stated, because it was true.  She had been delightful company for the evening, and they had spent most of dinner joking about pop songs and talking about the perils of being the frontman (or frontwoman, he supposed?) of a talented group of singers - constantly feeling the desire to spread the wealth of solos but not necessarily sure if it was their place to turn down the endorsement of their peers.  "Unfortunately, our Founders' Day is coming up, which means I have about four times as many rehearsals as usual for the next ten days or so."  
  
"Ohh," she nodded with a knowing smile.  "I know how those go.  Always having to showcase the pride and joy of the school, the most successful of the student groups..."  
  
"Exactly," he replied, glad she didn't think it was an excuse.  "The Warblers are such a huge part of their appeal for alumni donations, I think we brought in something like half the scholarship funds last year.  And we always get good press, especially with Regionals coming up in two months.  So we do a huge showcase."  
  
"So do we, for ours - which is horrible because it's always right before graduation, so we're trying to get Senior Night together, plus whatever we're doing for the ceremony itself, and Founders on top of it all."  She shook her head.  "Yours is at least staggered nicely."  
  
"Staggered from performances, yes, but always barely two weeks after exams," he chuckled.  "So we have to put everything together in ten days - nominate soloists, select songs based on who has earned solos, arranging which is such an intense process for acapella music, plus actually rehearsing and getting ready to perform."  The solo nomination process was always a big deal, too, and often turned into a fight.  The Warblers had a history of rewarding initiative both in the group and outside of it, and Founders Day was the opportunity for a first-year Warbler to really shine.  Of course upperclassmen were eligible as well, and at least a few of them would end up with their own songs.  The Council always sang something themselves, which he knew Thad, David, and Wes had been working on for a few months already.  But nominating others who were not usually featured often turned into a strange political battle, with everyone trying to nominate everyone without nominating themselves as was prohibited by the rules.  Alliances were made, people made deals, with preference essentially given to those who made the most complicated back-room arrangements possible because it meant it was more difficult to trace things back to them.    
  
Some years were fine.  Some years were genuinely based on who had been an asset to the group over the year, who had been working hard, who had shone on lesser lines in competition.  His sophomore year, on the other hand, it had devolved into a giant conspiracy theory when Jim's ex-best-friend nominated Richie for a solo after Richie stole Jim's girlfriend, and the next thing Blaine knew he had ended up with four solos because he was the only featured singer the entire group could agree on.  
  
That was how he'd gotten his place in the spotlight.  He wondered who would take that place when he graduated.  There were a few promising underclassmen, but almost none of them were serious enough about music  _or_  the group to live up to that kind of pressure, let alone to thrive in it as he had.  Kurt could, certainly, but Blaine wasn't sure he wanted to be the one supporting him.  Not if it meant-...it would certainly mean spending more time with Kurt, working with new soloists almost always fell to the lead particularly if they didn't hate each other.  
  
He didn't hate Kurt.  He had the opposite problem, particularly when Kurt sang...  
  
"We should start planning something for our groups to do together," Blaine stated as they rounded the final bend toward the road, approaching campus, Jean stepping carefully around the ice.   
  
"After your competition, I'm guessing," Jean replied, nodding.  "Sometime in the spring?"  
  
"Probably," Blaine confirmed.  
  
"Isn't it a little early?"  
  
"Something tells me it'll take a few rehearsals of doing nothing before any of the Warblers are ready to buckle down and work," he replied with a grin and a roll of his eyes.  "They don't know what to do around girls."  
  
"Other than treat us like ladies?" Jean teased.  
  
"Most of them can't even manage that."  He chuckled to himself as he pictured Nick and Jeff at Sectionals, and the look on Wes's face as though trying to figure out which if any of them he could flirt with without his girlfriend breaking up with him, and the way Rick kept sidling up to girls and subtly flexing his strong biceps, and poor Sam who just kept staring at them as though they were gorgeous porcelain statues he was afraid to go near for fear they would break - or would break  _him_  like that girl in Lima.    
  
"Fortunately for us both, you can," she replied.  She slowed to a halt, bringing Blaine with her.  "I've had a lovely time tonight, Blaine."  
  
He smiled down at her and replied honestly, "So have I."  But it was starting to get to that point in the evening where he was meant to do  _something_ , and he wasn't entirely sure he knew...how, exactly.  Obviously kiss her goodnight, she had seemed to send him all the signals that she wouldn't be opposed to it, that it wouldn't make her think that he thought that she was easy or anything like that, but it felt foreign.  Mysterious.  Like grasping in the dark for some kind of lamp without knowing what lamps there might be or at what height.  He wasn't sure if he should... _what_ , exactly?  How he should move, what to do with his hands, whether there was a moment that was better than others...  
  
He'd only kissed one person before, and that had just felt  _right_.  Except for the part where it felt horribly, vilely wrong, that was; it had felt like the right moment and the right musical background and the right setting and the absolute wrong person. But here he was with the right person, no music, a passable setting, and no idea if it might be the right moment or not.  
  
If he didn't know, that meant it probably wasn't the right one, didn't it?  
  
He couldn't be deterred by that, though.  Because he was starting to really like her - in a way that could only be good for him, he knew.  He enjoyed her company, she didn't leave him frustrated and scratching his head the way some of the girls his friends had gone with did, and they understood each other's passions.  At least the truly important one.  Which meant that Jean was absolutely someone he could date.  She was someone he could be involved with, could go steady with. Someone who could get the Kurt in his head, the glasz-eyed judgmental Jiminy Cricket that had taken up residence in his every thought, to shut up and leave him alone.  Someone who could let him be normal and healthy and successful and happy all at the same time.  
  
It had to be possible.  He refused to give up on that thought yet.  He refused to believe that he really did have to choose between being passionate and being healthy.  He just had to try harder to balance them.  And Jean...Jean could help him strike that balance.  
  
Nervously, he cupped her face and hoped his palm wasn't too sweaty on her cheek.  She looked at him, eyes shining in the lamplight, as he leaned in to kiss her.  It felt...okay.  Unremarkable.  Not bad, but not electric.  Not like storybook romances or like the swell of a crescendo at that crucial moment in a musical.  Not like he felt the world melt away and dissolve into an empty street for him to sing and dance down the boulevard in wonder.  Not like clutching each other on a footbridge away from the prying eyes of townsfolk.  Not like dreamily ascending the stairs and unable to sleep because the night has been so incredible.  Not like putting his arm around her on a carousel and being unable to take his eyes off her.  Not like being alone together on a magical island and feeling alive for the first time in a warzone.    
  
Not like sliding up the bed to kiss the amazing boy who talked to animals and knew brand new musicals backwards and forwards and sang about the beauty of being gloriously ordinary when he was anything but.  
  
It felt fine.  Nothing more.  Nothing like it was meant to feel if you kissed the person you really liked.  
  
He just had to try harder, he told himself.  It was a light, mostly-chaste kiss, maybe he just needed to pour more of himself into it. How could he expect to get anything out of it if he wasn't putting everything he had in?  He deepened the kiss, one hand encircling Jean's back, lips moving quickly as he tried desperately to get something - anything - to feel half as good as it was supposed to.  If he could just try harder, this could be right.  If he could just be a little better, put in a little more of himself, be a little more invested, a little more intense, just a  _little bit more_ -  
  
He could do this.  He just had to work a little harder for it.  That was all.  He could have this the way everyone else could, he could make this feel as good as he had imagined it.  Maybe he was just setting his expectations too high anyway, and maybe this was what it was meant to feel like and he was just someone who demanded too much from himself.  No - he just wasn't trying hard enough, he concluded.  He wasn't giving it everything because he was still thinking of other things that he didn't want, comparing her to something that felt way too good for anyone to deserve.  
  
Of course it felt good.  It was bad for him.  Cake tasted better than vegetables and always would.  That didn't mean he should expect vegetables to taste like sugar and chocolate just because he liked sweets.  Quite the opposite, really.    
  
If he tried a little harder-  
  
Jean pulled back, placing a hand on his chest when he tried to move forward to keep kissing her.  He was almost there, he swore, just another few minutes and he'd-  "Blaine," she said quietly.  "I-...I like you but that's...I-I think that's enough for now."  His eyes flew open, and she looked embarrassed in the pools of lamplight.  Flustered.  Ashamed.  "I know I'm not a shrinking violet, but that doesn't mean I'm  _that_  kind of girl."  She worried her lower lip with her teeth, glancing at him every so often for a fleeting second before going back to staring anywhere but near his face.  
  
Oh god.  That hadn't been what he was trying to do at all.  "I'm sorry," he said quietly, trying to meet her gaze so she could see that he really meant it.  "I didn't assume that, I wasn't trying to-...I didn't mean it like that."  He withdrew his hands from near her, dropping them to his sides.  "I guess I just...get intense sometimes.  I feel too much."  It was the problem he always had, wasn't it?  Feeling too much?  Only in this case it was more about not feeling enough - trying to find a way to stop being numb when he shouldn't be, to awaken something within him that he knew was there, down there  _somewhere_.  To try to get past this barrier of unfeeling until he could get to the overly-expressive, overly-intense feelings he knew were down there because he'd felt them before.  "I didn't mean to offend you, Jean, I would never think that."  She studied him for a moment, trying to assess his sincerity, and appeared to find it valid.  She nodded and began to walk toward the park's entrance, waiting until Blaine fell into step beside her before going very far.  "I really am sorry."  
  
"It's fine," she replied.  
  
He thought for a moment of trying to explain, but there was no way that would be a good idea.  Even if he were capable of explaining why without telling her about how he knew the feelings lurked deeper, without telling her about the other person he'd kissed...no one ever wanted to be told that kissing them was  _fine_  instead of amazing.    
  
He needed to learn to control himself better, he chastised himself.  If he didn't want to end up like his mother, a robot of a human being, he needed to keep a tighter grip on his emotions - or at least on his outward displays of them.  Acting out feelings in song was dangerous enough, but acting them out in other ways was downright destructive.  Self-destructive more than anything, he supposed.  
  
He squeezed her hand gently as they said goodnight at Crawford's front gate, the furthest he was allowed to go this time of night.  "I'll call you this week," he offered, hoping he hadn't ruined his chance.    
  
She smiled faintly.  "I'd like that."  
  
"And not next weekend, but the following one - after the Showcase is over - I would enjoy taking you out again."  He might have been pressing his luck, but she just gave a sly smile and a little wave as she slipped back onto campus and into the darkness beyond the well-lit gates.  He walked slowly to his car, pausing to collect himself for a moment before he drove back toward Dalton.  
  
He was exhausted.  Being a gentleman was draining, and fixing mistakes after failing to be a gentleman was moreso.  He needed a good night's sleep to straighten himself out.  
  
He had a feeling the dream would return again, with its warm feelings and intense pleasure and sticky sheets.  He almost wanted them to; that terrified him.  
  
It was the deepest thing he'd felt all night.


	22. Chapter 22

After the dinner, Kurt wanted to be around Blaine more than ever. Everything Leroy had said made it sound like he and Hiram had started off much like Kurt and Blaine, only so much older. If the two of them started now, Kurt could only imagine how many kinds of wonderful their life together could be by the time they were that old. Even as nervous as Hiram was, as scared as he seemed of his own shadow at times, as afraid as he was that people would know and as much as he cautioned Kurt against doing anything "outlandish" or "foolhardy"...the two of them were together. They had a home, they had a  _life_. Maybe Blaine just needed to meet them. Maybe then he could stop being so afraid of...whatever it was he was afraid of.   
  
He knew it had helped him immensely, seeing people like himself like that. When Leroy started talking about his time in the Navy and how he never fit in because he was one of exactly three Negro officers, such that he had to maintain some distance from the men in his command but couldn't socialize with the white officers because he wasn't allowed in the mess hall with them, and how making people uncomfortable by virtue of his existence wasn't something that ever made him feel like changing who he was ("In fact," he had said with an impish grin that Kurt immediately liked, "It almost has the opposite effect.")...it had felt like every bit of what Kurt had felt but thought he should hide, every deep dark corner of himself, was suddenly okay with this affirmation he never sought and had no idea he ever needed. The idea that feeling separate and apart didn't have to be a bad thing, but could instead be a strength, made him feel almost giddy - knowing that being different could make him special, make him stronger, give him an edge...  
  
He'd thought it for a long time, but never had anyone put voice to it except in his own head before. He had no idea he needed to hear it until the moment when that changed everything.  
  
Maybe that was all Blaine needed. to hear someone else talk about it, to meet people who had gone through it and were different and were stronger, who could still blend in if they wanted to but didn't have to all the tie, who had so much- who had  _everything_. Maybe if he could get Blaine to go with him to another dinner, or even just...he didn't know, exactly, but if he could just show Blaine that it was something beautiful, what they had. What they could have.  
  
Though they would have elegant parties because he couldn't get over the idea of Blaine in a dapper European suit, looking quite the dandy as they sang for their friends. Just because they didn't  _have_  to have those sorts of things to be happy didn't mean they weren't entitled to them if they chose, right?  
  
By the time he dropped Rachel off in Lima, it was nearly 11. There was no way he would make it back to Dalton before curfew even if he weren't too tired to drive safely, so he drove home instead. All he wanted to do was see Blaine, to talk to him, to tell him about the amazing night he'd had...but calling the dorms at nearly midnight would draw attention to his absence and the fact that technically he was breaking school rules; his pass was only for the evening, not the entire weekend. Instead he let Carole cluck over him and fix him a glass of warm milk before bed. Even if there was no way it would help him sleep tonight, not as excited as he was, it was still delicious.  
  
* * * * *  
  
As nomination meetings went, the one on Sunday was relatively tame. Despite Jeff and Nick sending each other uneasy glances through the first half of the nominations, worrying that they would once again be passed over for individual moments of glory as solos were doled out to others, they were each given a song of their own. There was a dustup shortly thereafter when Donald's nomination by his roommate was challenged as coerced because not only was Donald not particularly deserving of a solo, but everyone knew that Donald's older brother had the ability to get almost anything a person could possibly want and sneak it onto campus. Every bottle of alcohol retrieved in a crackdown in the past six years had come from Donald's brother originally - first when he was a student, and now through the younger man, and there was a grumble of suspicion that Donald had paid for his nomination in the promise of some type of illicit substance. Ultimately his nomination was accepted but a solo wasn't granted on the grounds that "Warbler Donald has not yet proved himself worthy, vocally or in any other measure."   
  
As Kurt watched the drama unfold, he couldn't help but glance over at Blaine. The Senior Warbler was seated in a chair almost directly across from the Council and watching the entire proceedings with rapt interest and bemusement. He kept expecting Blaine to say something, to recommend him for a solo - after all, if anyone in the group knew how talented he was, how underutilized he had been within the group, it was the boy who asked him to sing flirty duets. If anyone recognized his voice's potential as a showstopper, it was Blaine.  
  
But the boy said nothing, just nodded and applauded dutifully along with the others.  
  
Kurt wondered if maybe Blaine wasn't allowed to recommend anyone, if he - as the lead vocalist - was disqualified from an assessment of who should get a solo. That was the only thing that would make sense. Because if Blaine was allowed to nominate people but wasn't nominating him...what did that mean? That Blaine didn't think he was talented? That Blaine didn't think he was  _worthy_? And, if not, then why not? What had he done to-  
  
The fact that Blaine wouldn't even look at him made him think it wasn't about his vocal prowess.   
  
Wes glanced over David's shoulder at the list of selectees - Kurt couldn't remember if they were at 5 or 6 now, but David had been keeping his usual dutiful notes throughout. "The Council hereby opens the final solo slot," he stated. "As is our custom, this selected soloist will perform the opening number in our showcase. The Council will hear nominations at this time." A few hands shot up, including Blaine's. Aha, Kurt smiled. Blaine had simply been saving his nomination for the most prestigious number. He had recognized Kurt's talent and was just waiting for the right time to display it, thereby giving him the opportunity to truly showcase his voice with a spectacular opening number.  
  
"The Council recognizes Senior Warbler Blaine Anderson."  
  
Blaine stood when recognized by the Council. "Thank you. Distinguished Council, I would like to nominate for the opening solo a Warbler whose unique voice has proven itself versatile and unexpected, and whose dedication to the group has been evident, and whom I'm sure we would all consider a friend and an excellent contributor to the Warblers as a team." Kurt preened at Blaine's compliments, trying not to let his grin get too smug. He had been so foolish to doubt his boyfriend - of course Blaine knew he was talented and would nominate him this way. He flicked his hair back, sitting up straighter on the edge of the couch as Blaine continued. "I hereby nominate Junior Warbler Bill Pfouts."  
  
Kurt's eyes widened as a name other than his was announced. Yes, Bill's voice was higher than his now and he was certainly a nice enough guy - with a passable accent in French, even, as Kurt knew from class, but that-...that wasn't the point. That wasn't  _fair_. Blaine had the option to nominate someone for that spot and nominated someone else? A boy who wasn't even-...everyone had seen Bill with his girlfriend and looking genuinely happy, not like it was fake at all, so he knew it wasn't a matter of Blaine liking Bill better. Why didn't Blaine pick him? Why didn't Blaine recognize how hard he had worked, how good he would sound if given half a chance? What was so wrong with him that Blaine couldn't appreciate-  
  
And why could Blaine still not look at him?  
  
He didn't understand it. They were supposed to mean something to each other now, they certainly-...was Blaine that terrified of anyone figuring it out that he was going out of his way not to acknowledge him in public? Was it wrong of him to ask for more than that? Because the idea of having to distance himself from the handsome boy, from  _his boyfriend_ , whenever there was anyone around, was almost too much to take. He knew Leroy had talked about how things had to be different when you weren't around other people who knew, but at the same time he had made it sound like there should be an abundance of homosexual boys at Dalton. Why couldn't he find any of them? Why couldn't he and Blaine find them and form their own little enclave, like out in California on the naval base? At least then he could be near the boy who made his head spin and not have to put so much distance between them that his chest ached.  
  
Why couldn't they at least behave as they had toward one another before they went from being best friends who understood one another to...more? Why couldn't they at least have that much? Three months ago, Blaine would have recommended him for that solo, he was sure of it. And now...  
  
...Now Blaine wouldn't even glance in his direction, training his eyes carefully ahead at the Council as Wes said, "Thank you, Warbler Blaine. The Council has a nomination for Junior Warbler Bill Pfouts. Is there a second?"   
  
There was a second, and challenges, and competing nominations. None of them contained his name. For the first time in his life, he felt invisible. Blending in to suit the Warblers, to suit Dalton, had backfired beyond what he could have imagined. In the end, Bill was selected for the opening solo, and he flashed Blaine an appreciative grin as he sat a little straighter in his seat. Kurt stared at the table with a distant expression and tried to pretend it didn't feel like his chest was caving in on itself when he couldn't feel Blaine's gaze anywhere on him.  
  
He was torn between wanting to make a quick exit, to gather his things and slip out as quickly as possible to leave the others to mutual self-congratulation while he tried to avoid the boy who seemed to be avoiding him...and wanting to stay, to corner Blaine somewhere in the hall and demand to know what was so wrong with him that Blaine wouldn't give him what he would've tried to give him months ago. What about him  _now_  was so much less worthy of that solo.  
  
"We come, then, to the final nomination for the 1960 Founders' Day Warbler Showcase," Wes stated proudly.  
  
Kurt was confused. Hadn't the last one been the final nomination? Hadn't the last slot been the final one? No one else seemed perplexed, even those who were paying attention (as opposed to the few who had gotten their solos and taken to ignoring the rest of the proceedings as they scratched out potential songs to suggest to showcase their own voices)...but that seemed like a very strange thing to make up on his own. If the Council had made a mistake, and had indeed said that the last solo was the final one, then more people should think this was odd. When a quick visual sweep of the room revealed that no one shared his confusion, but instead looked intrigued, he leaned over to Bobby and whispered, "I thought the last one was the last."  
  
"The last solo," Bobby whispered back, glancing over to make sure he wasn't catching the Council's attention by speaking out of turn. "This is for the torch-passing."  
  
"Torch-passing?" Kurt asked, not sure what that meant or what to make of it.  
  
Bobby gave a slight nod. "Every year, someone sings with the lead vocalist, usually the most complicated arrangement. And the person who does it almost always is the frontrunner for the next year's lead vocals slot. Blaine did it last year."  
  
Kurt wasn't sure what to make of the idea exactly, but offered a quiet, "Sounds impressive."  
  
Bobby gave another nod and turned his attention back to the Council as Wes said, "Whoever is chosen must not only be a stellar vocalist, but someone who has exhibited leadership potential and proven himself to have a strong commitment to the Warblers, our history, and our reputation. The Council will now hear nominations."  
  
Sam's hand shot up first with an uncharacteristic "please call on me" urgency, and Wes nodded. "Junior Warbler Sam Evans, the floor is yours."  
  
Sam stood. "As you guys all know, I really love being a Warbler. There's a reason I haven't given it up even when I had to drop everything else for school stuff. And it's been hard, being on probation this year and feeling like if I did one little thing to screw up, it's gonna cost me this. I really appreciate it, everyone rallying around me like you have - even if it's not always easy for me to...I don't like asking for help and it bothers me how much I need sometimes," he said with a bashful smile as he glanced around the room. "But one Warbler has gone above and beyond everything else, and thanks to him..." Sam broke into a grin, the broadest and most genuine Kurt had seen from him all year. "As of the results of exams, I am no longer on probation."  
  
There were expressions of surprise from most of the Warblers, but none was more surprised than Kurt - he knew Sam had been working, but he knew Sam had worked hard prior to this term and always with poor results. He of all people understood how little Sam's effort level had to do with his success at school, so to know that apparently everything had paid off, that he could finally stop working himself to exhaustion and could maybe start enjoying a social life a little bit was fantastic. But better still was the look on Sam's face - one of near-wonder and  _pride_  in himself, as though even he couldn't believe he'd done it but ecstatic that it had happened. It was so different from the downtrodden, frustrated scowl Kurt was used to seeing, the look that seemed to grumble "I'm doing it because I have to, but I honestly don't think it's going to help anything." He was so incredibly happy for Sam, almost beaming himself as he clapped along with the others, applauding their teammate's success and the fact that they weren't going to lose him for the term.   
  
Sam grinned and looked over at Kurt with a look of fond gratitude, then turned to the Council and said, "That's why I would like to hereby nominate Junior Warbler Kurt Hummel for the final solo of the Showcase."  
  
Kurt stared at him, stunned. Of all the people who had helped Sam, all the guys who had been tutoring him since before Kurt had even come to Dalton in the first place,  _he_  was the one who-  
  
"Kurt, you didn't just try and get me working harder - not that I don't appreciate that," he added to the other guys awkwardly. "You figured out why it didn't work and now I can fix stuff. Work on things better instead of just longer. If anyone should get the number, I think it's you."  
  
Kurt blinked and stammered, "I- I didn't do anything, Sam, not really, and there are so many other talented people in this group-"  
  
"Do you decline the nomination, Warbler Kurt?" Wes asked.  
  
"No," Kurt replied quickly, looking around to see whether there was a slew of vultures ready to pick him apart should he - the new guy, the boy they still weren't entirely sure about sometimes who liked standing out just a little too much for some tastes and liked girl songs far too much - get this spot, but the boys were nodding, smiling, supportive. As though they understood why what Kurt had done for Sam was somehow different than what any of them had thought to do. "No, I...I don't decline the nomination. I accept it. Happily, in fact," he added with an excited grin as he tried to make a joke through his nerves.   
  
"Is there a second then?" Wes asked, and several hands raised.  
  
"I'll take Jeff's second," David stated as he made note of it, nodding to the others in acknowledgment that he had seen them but needed only one for the official minutes.   
  
"Thank you, Councilmember David. Are there any challenges?"  
  
Kurt tried to look around to see whether it looked like anyone else was going to try to take the number, but his eyes stopped on Blaine who was sitting very straight in his chair, eyes straight ahead, seeming stiff and nervous all of a sudden. He had seemed distant for the entire meeting, but this was more blatant, more awkward than he was used to seeing the boy. He was used to a projected air of confidence at all times, not the hesitant worry he was seeing now.   
  
"All those in favour?"  
  
To Kurt's absolute shock, every hand in the room raised - most quickly, then the few stragglers. Blaine's hand was last; he drew in a deep breath, and suddenly the confident posture and grin were back as he raised his hand for all Warblers to see. But it looked less-than-genuine, as though Blaine weren't actually happy for him for some reason he couldn't fathom.  
  
"Congratulations, Kurt," Wes said with a warm smile. He banged the gavel to adjourn the meeting, and Kurt was swept up in a flurry of congratulatory back-pats and shoulder-cuffs by everyone but Blaine, who slipped out into the hall unnoticed by everyone.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The dreams happened every night now. Sometimes it started as something else; sometimes it was nothing but vile, filthy passion. Sometimes it was vague, ambiguous, just pleasant feelings and occasional sensations like knowing he could smell Kurt's shampoo; others, it was vivid, descriptive, concrete, where he could see every hair on Kurt's pale, blemish-free torso and feel every hitch of the boy's breath when they touched. Sometimes it wasn't Kurt - not precisely, at least. Sometimes it was just a beautiful boy with soft hands and a sense of true, unalterable closeness. Sometimes the boy chased him, but it was almost always the other way around: him chasing the boy. Chasing Kurt. In one dream, he thought he was in luck as it started with him chasing Jean, but as soon as he caught her he saw that her hair had shortened and turned brown, and she had gotten taller than him. In the dream, he was happy; when he thought about it after he awoke, he felt nauseous.  
  
But none of that was as bad as the waking part.  
  
There was a moment when he first awoke, a fleeting feeling of release, of warmth, of unrestrained pleasure and satiation. Then he would realize why, would come to his senses enough to remember what was in the dream and awaken himself enough to know why it wasn't okay. Then he felt disgusting. Then he felt like he wanted to curl up into a ball and wish himself into nonexistence. He would think of the other boys down the hall and how none of them had this problem - why did it have to be him? Why did he have to-...why couldn't it be someone else? Why was he so unable to fix himself?  
  
Sam could read better now, and Bill could hit a high B without straining. They'd had goals, worked at them, and gotten to where they wanted to be. Why the hell couldn't he? What was he doing wrong? Why wasn't his resolve strong enough? Why couldn't he stop?  
  
He had been avoiding Kurt for days and it only made the ache in his chest and in his groin  _worse_. That wasn't supposed to happen. He was supposed to just stay away from Kurt and feel better.   
  
He wasn't supposed to be having these thoughts when he was awake and fully conscious. He wasn't supposed to be getting worse like that. At the very least, when the thoughts popped up - which they had occasionally before, he couldn't deny - he was supposed to instantly recognize them for what they were: sickness. Foul, undesirable symptoms of his illness. Something to be squashed immediately and then condemned. Not something he should allow himself to be lost in the fantasy of. Not something he should be  _glorifying_ , even for a split-second in math class or during rehearsal as he watched Kurt attempt to stretch out his shoulders after carrying a huge stack of sheet music in - stretching from side to side and rolling his shoulders with a look of exhausted relief on his face-  
  
The problem, he concluded with despair, was precisely what his father had identified in him so many years ago. He wanted things too much. If he didn't  _want_  so much, this wouldn't be a problem. If he didn't  _want_  Kurt so deeply...  
  
Because that's what it was. Desperate, needy, hedonistic  _wanting_  that he couldn't control no matter how hard he tried. As disgusted as he was by what these feelings made him, the disgust didn't extend to the beautiful counter-tenor - not really. Everything about Kurt was just so...so  _lovely_ , even the parts that were snide and imperfect. Everything about him was so entrancing, so captivating, that avoiding the boy made him yearn so deeply he couldn't think of anything else. And when they saw each other across the rehearsal room, he wanted so desperately to kiss Kurt, to wrap his arms around those shoulders and feel the scruffy press of shadow against his palm, to feel those soft lips on his and the rumbly vibrations coming through Kurt's chest as he moaned.   
  
Avoiding him was the only solution, Blaine knew that, but even that seemed to just be covering up the truth, delaying the inevitable. He was still sick; he would only be cured if he stopped wanting, and Kurt's absence in his room and in his life only made him want  _more_.  
  
And avoidance was hardly a fail-proof plan. Not when there were other people and circumstances that could force them into a room with one another like this. Force them into a duet together, into Kurt getting a performance spot at the Showcase so that he would have to work with the boy to help him prepare. That was tradition, after all, the lead vocalist assisting the new, first-solo Warblers. Giving them advice.  
  
What advice could he possibly give? Who in the world wanted advice from someone as ill as he was?  
  
But he couldn't let that weakness show. He couldn't let anyone know about-...not even Kurt could know how bad off he was. If Kurt knew...then the boy who apparently had neither shame nor a sense of decency would want things, too, would know that they were a possibility and would try to take-...and he couldn't have that.   
  
He couldn't have that because he wouldn't be able to say no. He could barely say 'no' now and there wasn't even a question on the table.  
  
No, he scolded himself as he tried for the sixth time in the past hour to figure out how to get out of rehearsing with Kurt. He could do this. He could handle it. He was nothing if not in-control of himself, and he had been raised to be strong enough to hold his emotions and desires in until  _he_  chose to channel them elsewhere. He would be fine.  
  
He drew in a deep breath and pushed open the doors of the Commons to find Kurt already there, staring out the window nearest the piano. Backlit by the sunset like that, Kurt appeared even taller and leaner than usual, with long lines shaping his neck and torso and slim legs. Blaine could only imagine how amazing his face must look in the pink-purple light and made a conscious choice to stay further from the window and at Kurt's back instead of walking around where he would have a better view. "Hey," he offered, standing behind the couch. If he kept a piece of furniture between them at all times, he stood a better shot of not doing anything stupid.  
  
Kurt turned, a soft smile forming on his lips as he saw Blaine standing there. "Why, Blaine, hello," he replied, moving slowly around the couch. "I thought maybe you wouldn't show up."  
  
The accusation in Kurt's eyes- Kurt knew that Blaine had been avoiding him. He had hoped that wouldn't happen. Or he had hoped that Kurt wouldn't seem sore over it; he did, at least a little, even if he was still looking over like the next line out of his mouth was going to be 'I'm just glad you're here now.' "We do need to practice," he pointed out. "The Showcase is huge for us."  
  
"I know," Kurt replied. "I gathered that much from the way everyone was clamouring for solos." His eyes narrowed as he stepped closer. "Why didn't you want me to sing?"  
  
"What?" he asked, choosing to take the dumber of the two options. He knew what Kurt meant - or, at least, what he was almost sure Kurt intended to mean - but he could pretend he didn't. For all he knew, Kurt really did mean the less-likely of the two options, that he thought Blaine didn't want him to sing at all, and maybe-  
  
"Blaine. We both know I can sing well. If anyone in that group knows it, it's you. But when you stood up to make your nomination, you didn't nominate me. Why?" He took another step closer, and Blaine stepped back. "Why did it have to be Sam who picked me? Why did you want someone else?" His gaze dropped, and Blaine thought he was off the hook, but Kurt asked quietly, voice brimming with frustration, "Why do you always push me aside so you can have someone else?" He looked back up, meeting Blaine's eyes with incredulous betrayal, as though he couldn't believe what had been done to him, and Blaine took another step back.  
  
He wished he could explain it. He wished he could tell Kurt that it wasn't that he wanted someone else - that was the problem. He didn't lie awake at night and think about what duets he wanted to sing with Bill and how much Bill's face would light up when he sang something and how handsome he would look. He didn't go to sleep and dream of inappropriate acts with Jean. He didn't wake up feeling sick at least once a day because he wanted other people; he woke up feeling sick because he wanted  _Kurt_ , because he wanted him so badly that it felt like he couldn't breathe anymore and he didn't know how to make any of it stop. He wished he could tell Kurt that it wasn't what he thought at all, that it was far,  _far_  worse.  
  
But all he could do was stand there, both unable and unwilling to admit defeat, even to the victor. Perhaps especially to the victor.  
  
Except Kurt hadn't won, not really. Kurt wasn't getting what he wanted, either - surely Kurt was just as hurt in all of this as he was, surely Kurt was trying to fight just as hard even if he wasn't making it look that way. Sickness and perversion had won, not either of them.  
  
"So what are we singing together?" Kurt asked finally when Blaine didn't answer. He should have known better than to expect one, he knew that, but somehow he'd just thought that maybe...maybe if he heard Blaine say it, maybe if Blaine admitted he was just worried about what this meant and how to deal with it, then he could make him feel okay about things. Show him the study. Tell him about Men [#s](https://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%23s) 16 and 16.5. Take him to meet Rachel's father. Something -  _anything_. But every time he tried to bring up the subject, every time he tried to get Blaine to let him in even a little, he was shut out swiftly and spent the next few days chasing Blaine around the school trying to salvage their friendship.  
  
It needed to wait until Blaine was ready, he realized with extreme reluctance. As much as he wanted to show Blaine every piece of information he had been able to find - as few as those were - it wasn't going to do him any good until Blaine was ready to have the conversation without squirming and trying to get away from him.   
  
"'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?'"  
  
"That depends on what the song is," Kurt joked with a flirty smile, and despite Blaine's attempt at resolve, he smiled and rolled his eyes fondly. Victory. Kurt stepped closer and this time, Blaine didn't move away. He wanted to say something, though he had no idea what it should be. He wanted to tell him everything, to tell him about the dinner and about hoping for the future and about how much he had missed him, but what came out instead was a quiet, "Why do you keep backing away from me?"  
  
"I'm not," Blaine protested, standing his ground.  
  
"Not now," Kurt said slowly, his eyes narrowing as he regarded Blaine carefully. "Always."  
  
Though there was plenty of space to retreat, Blaine knew he couldn't - not from the question. Not from the question, not if he wanted Kurt to stop asking. He wasn't sure if he wanted Kurt to stop or not. He-...he thought he did, he wanted to want Kurt to stop, but all he really wanted was to hear the sound of Kurt speaking to him, to be close enough to just reach out and touch him.  
  
He wanted to stop feeling so badly, but he wasn't sure if he wanted that more than he wanted Kurt.  
  
"Because we shouldn't," he said finally, his voice soft as his big golden-brown eyes met Kurt's narrowed blue-green ones.  
  
"Why not?" Kurt whispered. He wanted to reach out and touch Blaine, to kiss him, to say all the things he didn't have words for, to tell him it was okay, but he wasn't sure where to begin. What to say to start unraveling everything that was wrong.  
  
"Because we can't," Blaine replied, his voice growing a little stronger, but he stepped forward half a step, closing the distance between them. He had to look up just a little to see Kurt at this distance and could feel him breathe slowly in and out, and could smell his aftershave and whatever cream or gel it was that Kurt used in his hair, and he leaned in to kiss Kurt softly on the mouth. The little surprised "mm" he heard in Kurt's throat made his heart ache even more, made him want to cling to the boy even though he should have wanted the opposite. He pulled back slowly, dizzy, trying to catch his breath and wondering why such a short kiss left him unable to draw in enough air, and Kurt gave him a shy little smile that sent butterflies straight to his stomach. "I missed you," he whispered, hating himself for saying it. It was true, but he shouldn't have.  
  
Kurt's breath caught and he looked bolder, though his voice stayed soft, breathy, incredibly attractive. "I missed you, too."  
  
He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out and he couldn't figure out what exactly to say anyway. He wasn't sure whether to call them disgusting or beautiful, lovely or sick, and his entire body felt like it was vibrating - thrumming with nervous energy and fear that maybe someone would discover them or maybe he wanted this even more than he'd thought. He stepped back and Kurt didn't chase him. "We...We should work on that song," he said, hoping that maybe singing would do its work, let him release at least the nerves and fear, let him express something - anything, even if it wasn't what the song was really about.  
  
He couldn't mean what the song was really about.  
  
"Are we switching off, then?" When Blaine looked confused, he clarified, "On lead."  
  
Blaine backed up another step, hands fumbling for his bag. "I have the sheet music here," he said as he handed Kurt a copy and kept one for himself, then produced the album and walked over to the record player.  
  
"It's not really a duet," Kurt pointed out as he glanced through the music. "It's a two-person harmonic line on lead, not a true duet."  
  
"It can't be," Blaine stated, frustrated that Kurt still wasn't getting it. They couldn't do this. And they couldn't sing duets. They couldn't sing love songs to each other anywhere outside the privacy of his dorm room, least of all in front of every important living Dalton alumnus. The only place it would be worse to sing a duet than that would be on a competition stage. What was so hard about that for Kurt to understand? Just because they were both too weak to stop themselves from acting on their mental illness didn't mean that they needed to declare it to the world like that.  
  
"And why not?"  
  
"Because we're-"  
  
Sick.  
  
Twisted.  
  
 _Wrong_.  
  
"-two boys, Kurt."  
  
That summed it up nicely.  
  
"What do that have to do with anything?" he replied flippantly.  
  
"Boys can't sing duets to each other, Kurt, we can't-...we can't."  
  
"I'm sure Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor would protest," he laughed. Blaine wished he could explain to Kurt why it wasn't the same, but it was as though the boy had no concept of why this was wrong. Of why they shouldn't be doing what it was they were doing. When Blaine didn't laugh at his joke or acknowledge the lack of inherent femininity in singing a simple duet, Kurt just shook his head and said, "Let's start."  
  
Blaine lowered the needle onto the record single and drew in a deep breath, turning to face Kurt as the [music](http://youtu.be/W2khQJGdnFE) began. It wasn't quite a simple two-line harmony, but it definitely wasn't a duet either; the parts intertwined, alternating between melody and countermelody, melody and harmony, with Kurt's part being a lot more complex than his. He had no doubt Kurt could handle it - of course Kurt was talented, that had never been the issue. That had nothing whatsoever to do with why he hadn't nominated him. Kurt would sound amazing, like he always did.  
  
That was part of the problem.  
  
He tried to prepare himself for the moment when Kurt would start singing, because he knew he was a goner for that - when Kurt sang, it was like something inside him couldnt' look away, and it was what had gotten him into trouble twice before. If it hadn't been for the boy and his stupid beautiful voice, he could have just maintained a vaguely inappropriate friendship instead of becoming... _this_ , this  _thing_  that had disgusting lustful dreams and feelings he could never express.  
  
 _Tonight you're mine completely  
You give your love so sweetly  
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes  
But will you love me tomorrow?_  
  
Surely enough, as soon as they began singing he couldn't take his eyes off Kurt. He wasn't sure if the boy meant to be flirtatious or just naturally was so, but the way he swayed just a little as he walked slowly along the front of the couch, their eyes locked the entire time, had Blaine's heart racing as he tried to sing. He backed away a little as Kurt came closer, which earned him a faint smirk from the taller boy, but neither tore their eyes away.  
  
He wanted to. He wanted to look away, to go sing the rest of the song from across the room with a giant divider between them so he wouldn't have to stare at the captivating, difficult-to-define shade of Kurt's eyes and his perfect voluminous hair and his lean body mostly-hidden beneath the Dalton uniform but looking slimmer in the cardigan he wore. He wanted to shut down every feeling he had and stop, just- just  _stop_. Stop wanting. Stop caring. Stop feeling. Stop everything.  
  
The problem was, he never felt more than when he sang.   
  
For as long as he could remember, music had been his outlet, his voice, his way to communicate all of the feelings he spent time bottling up because the kind of outbursts he wanted to have weren't socially acceptable. They were the kind of things that made a person end up on a steady stream of antipsychotics and antidepressants and antianxiety medications that turned a person into a robot who was physically incapable of feeling.   
  
Was that his choice now? Should he be going directly to the doctor to keep himself from feeling at all? Or letting it all out, pouring out every last bit of frustration and longing and wistful regret that had him feeling so scared? Because as he sang the title line, what he meant to sing was, "Why do you have to love me at all? Why can't I get away from you?"  
  
Why couldn't he stop?  
  
 _Is this a lasting treasure,  
Or just a moment's pleasure?  
Can I believe the magic of your sigh?  
Will you still love me tomorrow?_  
  
Kurt noticed Blaine move back slightly, and he felt like he shouldn't have been surprised. That was what Blaine did these days, wasn't it? Surge forward then pull back?   
  
He understood Blaine's hesitance, but they didn't have that kind of time. Not if they were going to be amazing together the way he wanted. Not if they were going to have the kind of incredible life he'd dreamed of - they needed to make plans, they needed to be together going into it so that they could move together. Be together. Just...exist as a unit as well as as two individuals.   
  
Together, not just in the same space, was that how Hiram had put it? The difference between where things were safe and where they weren't?   
  
He believed they could have it - not just believed. He knew they could. There was no reason they couldn't if Blaine would just let him....let him help. Let him show what there was to offer. Let him teach him what was available instead of constantly backing away like that.   
  
It was just so hard when Blaine wouldn't let him in. Wouldn't trust him.   
  
He missed what it used to be like, before he'd...before he'd been unable to keep himself from trying to kiss the incredibly attractive, amazingly talented guy he had fallen head over heels for. He missed being able to talk to him. To feel like there was someone in his life he could  _connect_  to. With Blaine trying so hard to back away, then coming closer, then backing away...  
  
That was really what he needed back. That was almost more important than having a boyfriend and a glamourous future - having his best friend. That was horribly cheesy, he knew, but he ached to think of a life without Blaine, a life where he genuinely didn't have someone to talk to...  
  
...only to realize that right now, he didn't have anyone to talk to, either. Rachel was the closest thing he had, and while he liked her much more than he used to she was still hardly a good conversationalist. She could make everything int he world about herself, regardless of how little it related to her, and she didn't actually understand so many of the things she tried to relate back. She didn't know what it was like to be him, to feel this way but know that if anyone found out how he felt he would be shunned by everyone he'd ever known. To know that there were maybe a handful of people in the world that he was likely to ever find that he might be able to date.  
  
And then he'd found the one he wanted to date, the one who seemed to want to date him back, but was shutting him out.  
  
Was that what all relationships were like? He knew his dad and Carole didn't talk much, but his dad had never been the talkative sort. Finn and Quinn really didn't talk, she just yelled at him a lot. Mr. and Mrs. Jones seemed to talk over dinner, at least, which had always seemed nice.  
  
He honestly didn't know what the difference was, if there was one. And what it meant. And what to do to fix it, to get Blaine talking to him.  
  
 _Tonight with words unspoken,_  Kurt began, approaching Blaine slowly, carefully, almost afraid of spooking him with a wrong move. He needed to get them back onto the right track, to get things fixed - if he could figure out what was broken. But he couldn't figure out what was broken unless Blaine opened up.  
  
 _You said that I'm the only one._  Blaine didn't back away. He almost wanted to, but not quite- not enough to make his feet move. He hesitated, and when Kurt continued to advance he stepped forward, one hand reaching out unbidden to touch Kurt's shoulder.  
  
He really was a sucker for when Kurt sang, especially when he looked so damned earnest and sincere. Like he needed to believe in the unspoken words, to put some kind of assurances on whatever this was, and Blaine found himself wanting an answer, too. Wanting to give him an answer, to make him feel like this could make sense even though it didn't. Even though there was nothing right about this at all and certainly nothing worth defining as anything other than the manifestations of their disturbed little brains, he wanted to when Kurt looked that invested.  
  
 _But will my heart be broken  
When the night meets the morning sun?_  
  
He wanted to make Kurt smile. His stomach did little flip-flops at saying something that would make Kurt laugh, and he didn't know what that meant. That wasn't something they talked about at his father's conferences - the relative severity level of boys who wanted to make other boys smile. Was that less severe, because it didn't involve the sorts of lewd acts he wanted to perform that were the final step? Or was it worse because it meant-  
  
...It meant he had fallen for Kurt completely.  
  
 _I'd like to know that your love  
Is a love I can be sure of  
So tell me now, and I won't ask again:  
Will you still love me tomorrow?_  
  
It wasn't going away.  
  
No matter how hard he tried, it wasn't going away and the revelation that his feelings for Kurt were deep, were something  _huge_  and complicated and so far beyond merely the kind of warm pleasure that the dreams held - which in itself was an immense sensation to dissect...He swallowed hard around the lump in his throat, trying to continue singing as he stepped closer still to Kurt.   
  
There was so much he wanted, so much- not enough. So many damned things - to touch, to listen, to smell, to taste-  
  
To  _feel_.  
  
Because as agonizing as it was to feel this way, as much as it felt like his insides were twisting in on themselves and tying themselves in knots every time he realized what it was he was doing, how much he was giving in to the thing he was meant to be fighting, as much as he knew all of that...the thought of not feeling this anymore, the thought of not being with Kurt, of not being around him anymore, of shoving him away, felt like a hot knife was being plunged through his chest, leaving him breathless.   
  
He faltered over the notes, and Kurt looked at him with concern. "Are you okay?"  
  
He wasn't. He never would be, and he-...he knew that. He knew there was nothing he could do anymore, nothing he could do to make this right, but he wanted to just curl up around Kurt and lie in bed with him and forget everything. Forget everything he wasn't supposed to be, forget all the things he's never been meant to do, forget all the things wasn't supposed to be feeling because he couldn't-  
  
He couldn't fight anymore.   
  
Maybe it was like music, he thought, where he wasn't supposed to want it this much or feel it this much, but it was his and his alone and nothing could feel as good as what that had to offer.  
  
He cupped Kurt's face in his hands, kissing him longingly, wanting to just forget everything that hurt and made him feel even sicker inside than he knew he was. Wanting to lose every piece of himself except the music and this boy and just-....just forget.  
  
 _So tell me now, and I won't ask again:  
Will you still love me tomorrow?  
Will you still love me tomorrow?_  
  
As the final notes of the song faded away, the kisses grew more frantic. Kurt wrapped his arms around Blaine's back, almost clinging to him, trying to hold him close and not let him back away. He felt them both moving backward, toward the couch, toward the end of the couch, and then he stopped noticing what his feet were doing because Blaine's tongue was pressing against his lips and trying to enter his mouth and he didn't know what the hell he was meant to do now. Rather, he knew in theory - maybe. He opened his mouth and moaned softly and the tongue surged forward; it should have been disgusting, but for some reason it felt incredible.  
  
The record ended, the dull 'thunk...thunk...thunk...' barely audible in the background, but still Blaine pulled away and tried to gather his wits about him. There was something he was meant to be-...something that wasn't this. Something he was forgetting that he shouldn't be. He picked up the arm of the record player and put it back at the start of the song. "We should-..." He swallowed hard, glancing at Kurt and shaking his head. "We should practice."  
  
Kurt drew in a nervous breath and exhaled on the words, "I thought we were," barely making it out before Blaine's lips were crashing back on his again.  
  
He'd never known he wanted a tongue in his mouth, let alone the effect that Blaine's appreciative whimper would have on him as he felt a sudden surge of interest below the belt and a kind of giddy, nervous sensation in his stomach. Then Blaine's mouth was gone from his suddenly, leaving him breathless as though his boyfriend had sucked all the air out of his lungs and abandoned him with nothing, only to let out a shuddery sigh as he felt Blaine's lips along his jaw, kissing hurriedly as though there was only so much time they could spend on this and he wanted to taste every bit of Kurt's skin he could. He felt Blaine's fingers fumble clumsily with his tie as he tried to access the collar button of Kurt's shirt. He tried to tilt his head to give Blaine more room but didn't want to tilt his head away from the heat of the boy's mouth, which led to a few awkward head bobs before the pads of Blaine's fingers skidded over the button itself. Two more passes and he felt the stiffness of his collar give a little.  
  
The feeling of Blaine's fingertips against the soft, previously untouched skin of his neck was almost too much, and his grasp on Blaine's back tightened as he let out a soft gasp. He wondered if there were more nerve endings in the area than he'd ever realized because it certainly seemed that way- oh god, let alone when Blaine's mouth moved a little lower, nose nudging between his collar and his neck to try and get more room, to travel further still...  
  
Kurt had never considered himself a particularly... _sexual_  person. He knew of the concept, of course, at least in theory and at least as far as it pertained to his non-homosexual counterparts. At least, he knew the general idea in as little detail as possible. He knew he didn't have the same kinds of urges toward girls that Finn did, and he knew that there were things a person could do that didn't involve procreation but he had no idea what things those might be. He didn't really want to know. He had, like any other teenager, had dreams and been told they were perfectly normal, and had moments of arousal while awake of course, but that was the extent of his knowledge.  
  
But the ever-growing list of things that Blaine could do that got him feeling this...this  _good_ , as though every nerve on his body was on overdrive and every inch of his skin was on fire and like he could not possibly feel more awkwardly hard in his uniform pants, had him suddenly curious. Suddenly wanting more, wanting to know. Because if simple kisses on his neck could feel like  _this_ , then he could only imagine what might happen next. He had thought the feeling of Blaine's breath on his neck was the most incredible sensation he'd ever felt, but that was nothing compared to his mouth there. What else might there be?  
  
He felt dizzy, faint, as though he couldn't keep either his balance or his wits about him, and he tried to warn Blaine but no words came. He started to lean back heavily, still holding onto Blaine for dear life, and Blaine seemed to understand - or at least, to move in the same direction Kurt wanted. He laid them back against the couch and shifted until he was mostly on top of Kurt, kissing and- and  _licking_  (which was too wet but apparently no one had told his nervous system that) his neck wherever he could get underneath Kurt's collar enough to find skin.  
  
He could feel Blaine's arousal against his legs, and the thought of it made him feel suddenly hot all over - nervous. Intimidated. Scared. And more than a little proud and in awe at the idea that kissing him, kissing his neck, made  _Blaine_  feel that good. It was a little crazy when he tried to think about it.  
  
Blaine's hands slid up and down along his sides before coming to rest just above his hip as Blaine's mouth moved back up to cover his. His mouth was wetter now than before, probably from all that kissing and mouthing along the neck and in areas that were hard to access properly, but the sloppiness almost felt good in a way that Kurt couldn't explain. He was the one to move his tongue forward this time, imitating what Blaine had done last time, and was rewarded with a groan and a forward motion of Blaine's hips. Kurt gasped, his own hips pitching up involuntarily against Blaine's thigh, and the feeling of pressure there was indescribable. "Ohhh!" he gasped, though the sound came out more like a whimper than a proper word, and Blaine repeated the movement with his hips with a panting noise of his own.  
  
He felt a hand move from his hip to his belt suddenly, and with a quick flick of Blaine's hand the leather strap was gone, flung to god-only-knew where. Then a jerk and the button was open, and suddenly-  
  
The feeling of warmth surrounding his erection was sudden, more shocking than cold would be at this point, and caused him to release a loud groan before he'd realized he was even making a sound. His head fell back, lips separating from Blaine's, and suddenly he felt hot kisses along the center of his neck as the hand wrapped around his hardness and began to stroke. Kurt gasped, his fingers clutching more tightly on Blaine's back. The pants were too tight, Blaine's hand and his own organ felt impossibly large inside the small space, and any movement felt as though it might tear through the grey wool. He tried to protest, but only a whimper escaped.  
  
Blaine seemed to get the idea, though - the hand pulled away suddenly, and he didn't realize how much he'd desperately wanted it there until it was gone. He suddenly felt colder, further away, even though he could still feel the heavy press of Blaine's body on his, the hitch of his breathing, and warmth of his mouth. The hand on his zipper, dragging it down, then on his waistband as Blaine attempted to shimmy him out of his pants and briefs. Kurt awkwardly tried to follow what it was Blaine was trying to get him to do, but it was hard without any words or any idea what he was doing.  
  
Blaine's hand closed around him again, and he keened, hips pitching upward as if trying to get more contact still. He could barely think, his head spinning as Blaine's hand began to move with firm, even, quick strokes. One hand moved up to clutch at Blaine's hair, fingers twisting in the pasted-down curls at the back of his neck.  
  
He should help, he concluded. He should make Blaine feel this good, because this was-...this was unbelievable, and he wanted to share it. He wanted Blaine to know how amazing this was because there was no way he could know no matter how much Kurt tried to tell him - even if his words weren't coming out in whimpers and noises and strings of vowels without any meaning. He moved his hand down to Blaine's belt, unfastening it and trying to get at the zipper, but instead Blaine's hips pitched forward into his hand and he found himself rubbing at the erection with his palm. He had no idea if it was what he was meant to be doing, he had a feeling he should probably have his hand inside the underwear just because he knew how good it was feeling for him, but the look on Blaine's face seemed to indicate that it was still an incredible sensation.  
  
Kurt had no idea how long it lasted a - hundred hours and not nearly long enough was the best he could come up with - before it felt like everything within him tightened and twisted and got hot and tightened and then suddenly  _released_ , semen painting the bottom of his cardigan and his and Blaine's shirts as he whimpered and squeezed and fumbled his palm against Blaine's half-undone pants. Blaine's hips began to rut harder, more insistently as he groaned and whimpered and  _growled_ , and Kurt could feel damp stickiness seeping through the material against his palm but not enough to really be messy.  
  
There was a moment of stillness, of fleeting warmth and unabated pleasure, of being fully satiated as the two boys lay against one another, panting and gasping and giggling at the rush of endorphins and being teenagers.  
  
And then Blaine realized what had happened, came to his senses enough to know what it was they had done, roused himself enough to know why it wasn't okay.  
  
Oh god, was it not okay.  
  
He felt disgusting. Disgusted with himself, with what he had done. Oh what had he  _done_? This was-...this was beyond dreaming and self-pleasure, this was-  
  
This was the end stage. This was the point of no return and he had passed it with gusto and had- had  _enjoyed_  what he-  
  
His stomach churned violently and he scrambled up, afraid he was going to be ill. More ill than he was already, more sick than he could- He hitched up his unfastened pants with his left hand, his right flailing awkwardly for a moment to his side as he stared at the boy, the handsome boy on the couch, staring up at him with wide, confused, trusting eyes as though this was something Blaine was going to explain for him. As though he had no idea what they had just done or why it was so,  _so_  very wrong. As though he didn't know that Blaine had just guaranteed that he was a severe case.  
  
Oh god, he had made Kurt worse. It wasn't just himself he had destroyed like this, either, it was Kurt too because that meant they were both in the end stages, being...being  _intimate_  with another man, let alone enjoying it - he'd heard the noises Kurt made, felt the way he'd rutted up, the way he'd thrust so enthusiastically and tried to return the movements and just-  
  
Now he really did feel sick. Because in the back of his mind there was a little frisson of excitement at the memory and the desire to do it again.  
  
He wasn't just severe, he was  _unrepentant._  He regretted it only because he knew it was a bad sign, not because he genuinely didn't want to do it again, and that wasn't enough of a reason. Clearly. Knowing it was wrong hadn't stopped him from doing any of this, from wanting - from  _taking_.  
  
"I'm sorry," he whispered, almost afraid of opening his mouth too wide for fear that his stomach would rebel and pour its contents all over the oriental rug. "Kurt, I- I'm sorry, we can't-" He raced from the room as fast as his unsteady legs would carry him in his hitched-up, unfastened pants.  
  
Kurt watched him go with wide, confused eyes - Not confused by what had happened, by what had felt so good, but by what had made Blaine suddenly-...they had been making progress, there had been connection even if it was one he'd never thought to seek out or one he particularly imagined he might enjoy. Blaine had surged forward only to retreat again at full speed, leaving him alone on a couch in the empty Commons, pants and underwear bunched awkwardly around his thighs, shirt and sweater stained with white fluid that was drying sticky already, quivering with anger and resentment and shame and  _hurt_. Only the sound of the end of the record was there to cover his ragged, wimpery breathing.  
  
 _So tell me now, and I won't ask again  
Will you still love me tomorrow?  
Will you still love me tomorrow?_  
  
Apparently the answer was no.


	23. Chapter 23

  
  
He couldn't do this anymore.  
  
He had thought that he had already gotten as bad as he could get, with the lust and the dreams and the things he did after the dreams...and the kissing, and the head-over-heels feeling like he couldn't get enough of just being around the boy who was going to be the end of him. He had thought that he was as sick as he could be, but he was wrong.  
  
He had done the worst thing he could have done - save for one even-worse thing. There was only one thing he could do that was worse than what he'd already-   
  
Blaine let out a strangled cry, the sound involuntarily ripping itself from deep within him as he felt the interested twitch at the thought of the even-worse thing. At the thought of doing the single most unnatural thing- the most-condemned, the most disgusting. the thing that, above all others, would mean he was unredeemable and had almost no chance of succeeding at recovery.  
  
Because that was the thing - even among his father's practice, recovery was hardly a guarantee. There were certain indicators that made a man more likely to get better, just like with any other disease. For example, with schizophrenics - if after the first few sessions they could at least recognize that the voices they heard weren't real, that was a good sign. It meant that maybe in time they could be treated, they could learn. In depressives, if the person refused to get out of bed even for a constitutional walk no matter how much doctors tried to tell them it would be good for them and make things feel better, if they refused to see the good in things no matter what their family pointed out to them, no matter how many positive things surrounded them, then that was a sign that they probably weren't going to be treatable except by more extreme measures, by higher dosages of medications, and sometimes even then it might not help.  
  
In the realm of sexual perversions, resistance of temptation was paramount. Because that was how a person could keep themself on track. Medications did some of the work, and aversion therapy - at least the kind his father did - boasted a higher success rate than most. But some patients still didn't get better. Unrepentant, difficult, severe cases stood the least chance of recovery. Men who didn't just think about other men, didn't just want them, but engaged in actual activity with them - especially repeatedly - were almost doomed to fail. They had to want to get well more than anyone else, more fervently, to be more guarded, to have more willpower...  
  
...they were such severe cases that only his own father would even try to treat them. The rest of the doctors in town chalked them up to being lost causes.  
  
How was he going to tell his father just how badly he had failed? Because if he hadn't been able to tell him back in December, when he was only a moderate case, how could he-  
  
...How could he tell his father what he had done? Let alone that he wanted to do it again.  
  
Another cry, this one more like a gasping whimper, as he raked his hands roughly through his hair. His fingers caught on the caked Brylcreme and tugged painfully, but he didn't care - he almost enjoyed it now. It felt better than everything else he was experiencing. Maybe he had other perversions, too, he thought with a despairful laugh. Maybe he was a masochist, too - wouldn't that just be great? Because he didn't have enough problems, enough sickness already. Because he wasn't already so fully immersed in illness, he needed to add more problems.  
  
Something else had to be wrong with him, he concluded, because clearly he couldn't be sane. If he were sane, he would know better. if he were sane, he would be stopping this thing that was making him miserable. If he were sane...  
  
...Then he wouldn't have this problem in the first place, would he?  
  
The whirring of his thoughts stopped for a moment, the singular wrongness about him the only concrete sentiment as he sank down heavily on the bed. If he were sane, he wouldn't be like this. He would be able to get this boy out of his head. he would never have have the boy in his head in the first place. He would have known as soon as Kurt started talking about things he wanted, that he needed to either stay away from the obviously-sick boy, or to get him help. He would have introduced Kurt to his father and helped him get well because that was what a sane, compassionate person would do. Instead he let himself-  
  
Let himself what? Was it just about the sexual act, the physical manifestation of his perversions come to fruition? Was that the problem? Or was it about the revelation before that, about the adoration and- and outright  _love_  he felt for the boy?   
  
Those were the cases that even his father turned away now. Ones where the man admitted to falling in love with someone. Sure, there were ways to try to treat it, but they were almost never successful. Once the man's lust converted into some approximation of actual emotional attachment - however horribly inappropriate - there were only a few ways of even attempting to deal with it and almost no one was willing. That was the point at which the man was put on more tranquilizers than his mother and sent on their way to live a completely empty, robotic existence that made his father look effusive and happy.  
  
No more feeling. No more agonizing twist of hot hatred and want in his gut every time he looked at that- that infuriatingly beautiful boy with his amazing eyes and his smile that could light up the room on its own. No more music and coming alive on-stage like the only thing that mattered in that moment was him and the sound and his voice and every emotion he couldn't put words to just pouring out of him. No more pain...but also no more joy, no more  _living_ , and that was so utterly depressing that he almost wished it would just come already so he could stop feeling so sad at the thought of not feeling sad anymore.  
  
How wrong was that?  
  
So it was a fistfull of tranquilizers, then - That was what he needed, and he knew that. He needed to be that empty if he was going to stop being sick, but the thought of-...the thought of not feeling anymore, of not singing or being a  _person_  at all, of just being another unhappy man in another ill-fitting suit-  
  
He could feel tears welling up, burning and stinging at the backs of his eyes as he tried to process the sheer agony and frustration of it all. He shouldn't cry, he admonished himself as he'd been admonished his entire childhood; that was for the weak. A real man knew how to hold in his emotions, not to let them flutter out on a whim like an irrational woman. Men didn't cry - only sissies did that.   
  
But wasn't that what he was? What he had always been?  
  
What he would always be?  
  
He drew his knees up tightly to his chest, arms clutching around him as he dropped his forehead to his knees and let out a shaky sob. He couldn't do this anymore. If that was his option, if that was the best he had a right to hope for given how sick he was?  
  
That was assuming it even  _worked_. So few of those patients came back to his father for long - most of them remained sick. Remained wrong. Remained, Blaine presumed, this miserable. Because there was no hope for any of them.  
  
He couldn't do this anymore. Not when it hurt this fucking much.  
  
That was another option, he realized. Not a good one, and one that was a sign of its own illness, but at least then it would be done. It would be better than having to try to tell his father, to try to explain what he'd done and that he wanted to do it again - and again and again and every day until he was too exhausted to sit up. It would be better than having to face all the people he would have to face if anyone found out what had happened. It owould be better than struggling for the next four decades until he finally, mercifully, dropped dead of more-natural causes. It would be better than feeling  _this_  for the rest of his life, because if there really was no hope for him-  
  
This would be more painful still, he realized, because not only did he have to try to stop feeling the way he did about the physical, but if he was going to succeed then he absolutely had to stay away from Kurt and the way his body jerked and choked and  _sobbed_  at that seemed to indicate what he thought of that, the involuntary response scaring him all the more.   
  
He couldn't keep playing slave to his instincts when to that boy. Not when it made him this miserable.  
  
The showcase was coming up, he reminded himself dimly as he tried to get his breathing under control enough to stop feeling so dizzy. And even though there were certainly enough talented guys in the group that they could find other soloists, it wouldn't be fair to just leave them in the lurch like that. To...to make them try to cover his parts in the group as well as on his solos. All on top of the distraction that his untimely demise would bring. So that...that wasn't a good idea right now. Afterwards, maybe. If he could-...if he could hold on for a week, then he could...something.   
  
That sounded responsible, he told himself with a very faint, very weak smile. It was indeed responsible, which he cared about only insofar as it meant that he wasn't entirely a lost cause. People who had lost all semblance of sanity couldn't be responsible, or loyal, or care about anyone than themselves. They couldn't understand anything outside the tiny, twisted confines of their minds, so that...that meant he was okay, right? Or at least that he wasn't quite as bad off as he'd thought.  
  
At least not until he did the next Worst Thing.  
  
His stomach twisted sharply, leaving him nauseous as he tried to draw in deep breaths. There was something he needed to do, even if he was suffering through this feeling for another week until after Founders' Day. Something that would keep him from crossing that absolute final line.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He didn't understand what had happened.  
  
Even now, almost two hours later, Kurt found himself sitting on the bed and staring into space and unable to fully comprehend how everything that had happened could be anything other than a strange and intense dream. He felt distant, at once pulled deeply inside himself and looking at the world from six inches behind his eyeballs, yet outside of himself and looking on as life moved too quickly past him.  
  
He had never given much thought to things, to- to  _those_  kinds of things. He hadn't sat around fantasizing about them, about what he would do with people...with boys in particular, really, but at all. Not the way he fantasized about other things, the way he fantasized about apartments and parties and singing on a Broadway stage, belting out the eleven-o'clock number. Not the way he fantasized about a boy pulling out a chair for him at dinner and sitting across from him and taking his hand and telling him he looked lovely in the candlelight.  
  
He had never contemplated what might make him feel good physically. Not like everyone else. Maybe he wasn't like other boys, he didn't know, because Finn and Puck and the guys talked about stuff like that a lot - even a lot of the Warblers, even though many of them were far too proper and respectable for that. And Blaine had obviously thought about it. Blaine seemed to know what he was doing and what he wanted far too much to have  _not_  thought about it.  
  
Only it seemed like Blaine had no idea. Because once again he had surged forward only to retreat a moment later, and it wasn't-...it wasn't just that Blaine had left that hurt, it was the look on his face...  
  
He had looked sick. Like he was going to be physically ill. Like he found the sight of Kurt, on the couch with his pants half-off and covered in sweat and semen, to be fundamentally  _disgusting_.  
  
Kurt could feel the lump swelling in his throat again, and he swallowed hard. No, he told himself. He wasn't crying again. He'd done his fill of that in the shower, then again as he stood over the sink and tried to scrub his sweater clean, the rough wool chafing his hands as he tried to remove every bit of sticky white-clear stain from the garment. It hung now in the shower, drip-drying and ready to be worn another day. He could slip into it tomorrow and it would be like nothing had happened.  
  
Everything had happened. But nothing had happened.  
  
So no - he wasn't going to start crying again. Not now, not sitting in his room while he listened to Sam try to pick out chords from a song Kurt thought he might recognize but couldn't be sure. Sam was rusty and had different taste in music, but he thought it sounded familiar. But as Sam's fingers moved clumsily over the fret of the guitar, he looked so  _happy_  that it almost hurt to look at him.  
  
Sam's problem was solved. It was fixed. He had gone and found what was wrong and was getting help and now he was happy. He could live a normal life. He could be like everyone else their age.  
  
And Kurt was stuck sitting on his bed, wondering why he had ever let himself believe that he would be entitled to as much.  
  
Maybe the book was right, he thought defeatedly. Maybe he was sick. That would make sense, why Blaine had looked at him with such disgust and fear and contempt. Maybe...maybe there was something wrong with him.  
  
No, he answered quickly, firm in his conviction. Because regardless of what they had done, there was nothing wrong with him. He was fine. He was fantastic. And he would be beautiful like Hiram and Leroy, so help him. He would have every single stupid piece of that damned fantasy world, with the apartment and the parties and the elegant clothing-  
  
...even if he had them alone, he would have them.  
  
For the first time in weeks, being alone almost felt preferable. Simpler. Less vile.  
  
It wasn't that he inherently disliked what they had done - it had felt so surprisingly, breath-takingly good that he could have enjoyed it very much. Under different circumstances, he might have wanted to do it again. But not now. Not after the way Blaine looked at him when it was over, like he was some disgusting piece of trash lying there on that couch-  
  
Never again. Not when it hurt this much when it was over.  
  
He understood now why people told girls not to be easy. It wasn't just about how the rest of the town saw them, because he knew firsthand it wasn't hard to disregard that. It was about how boys saw them. How boys didn't care. How they just-  
  
He wondered if Blaine would have looked at Jean like that, too, or if he would have been a gentleman had Kurt been a girl.  
  
He heard someone pounding on a door so hard in the hall that it almost echoed, and Sam stopped playing, lifting his head and looking around in confusion. Then another knock on another door, this time closer and proportionately louder.   
  
"What's going on out there?" Sam asked. He lay the guitar carefully on the bed and stood, ready to go investigate.  
  
"I don't know," Kurt replied quietly. He was curious but not curious enough; finding the energy to sit upright and appear as though he was okay was almost too much of a strain. He certainly didn't have the stamina to go investigating which crazy boy down the hall had gotten into a fight with which other crazy boy and was pounding on the door to demand he have his albums back or something.  
  
As soon as Sam opened the door, they heard someone calling, "All Warblers please, to the Commons. There is an emergency meeting! All Warblers, to the Commons!" They exchanged a confused look and Kurt shrugged. While the Warblers had their eccentricities and were known for doing things oddly and with a bit too much throwback to the Colonial era, this band of Paul Reveres was new even for them. Two boys running around, knocking on doors and shouting to get the group together seemed a little too demonstrative and as though it lacked a certain amount of decorum, but now he was intrigued. The emotion was subdued, dulled by the pain of the day and the fact that he couldn't get the look on Blaine's face out of his head, but even in this state he couldn't help but wonder what in the world could have caused such a ruckus that Wes would permit Warblers to run up and down the halls acting like crazed town-criers to round everyone up for an unplanned, unannounced meeting.  
  
He pulled his jacket out of the closet and shrugged into it as he toed on his loafers, and Sam looked at him curiously as he straightened his tie. "Are you okay?"  
  
Kurt stood straighter, his shoulders already too tight. "I'm fine," he replied, his voice higher than he would have liked. That always happened when he was trying to forget that he was upset, but he wasn't sure if Sam knew him well enough to see the difference yet. He desperately hoped not; the last thing he wanted to do right now was try to summon the energy to falsify a story. Pretending he was moderately okay at a time like this was difficult enough when all he wanted to do was crawl into bed and turn off the lights and try to pretend the entire day ever happened as he curled tightly onto himself and let the silent tears fall.  
  
Sam seemed to accept the answer with a shrug and a lopsided smile as they left the room. By the time they reached the lobby of Everett House, they were joined by five or six other Warblers, all murmuring excitedly about what had happened to bring about the meeting, what could be going on, what news there might be. Apparently someone's older brother had told him about the time that the Warblers were invited to sing for then-Princess Elizabeth and the news came in a meeting like this. Kurt had no idea how the brother would even know this because she had been queen for almost eight years already (eight years in a couple weeks, actually) and none of the current Warblers had brothers that much older than they were. He would have to ask Wes later if the story were actually true, but he was afraid of how long of a story he might get either way.  
  
At least the thought amused him long enough to be distracting.  
  
The Commons were bustling with excitement and confusion, speculation as two dozen boys with little imagination but a strong sense of protocol were left to devise for themselves the true purpose of the meeting. "Maybe it's a special performance."  
  
"Maybe there's another competition."  
  
"Maybe one of the Council's on probation - they can stay in the group but have to step down because you can't hold office if you're below a 3.0."  
  
"Maybe one of them's graduating early."  
  
"Maybe something's changed for Founders."  
  
Kurt glanced around the room, looking for-...for something, he couldn't quite figure out why as he felt himself rise up on his toes a bit, looking through the crowd of boys in identical clothes for-  
  
For a particular head of plastered-down hair.  
  
He cringed as he realized he was looking for Blaine, falling back down to a flat-footed position heavily. He didn't actually want to see Blaine. He didn't want to look anywhere near him anymore, not now. Not after that  _look_. He was grateful not to see any trace of the boy formerly known as his boyfriend.  
  
Formerly? Maybe. He wasn't sure about the protocol in situations such as these, but he knew boyfriends weren't supposed to treat people like that. And he was fairly certainly Blaine no longer considered him his boyfriend, either. If he ever had, which Kurt doubted.  
  
Maybe he really had made the entire thing up in his head. All the affection, all the tenderness he'd thought he'd seen there - it was all an act. All charm and smiles and musical interludes. None of it was genuine.  
  
The Council entered in a row like judges, taking their place at the table. Wes banged the gavel, and there was silence only because the boys wanted to know what was going on. Even without speaking, there was an undercurrent of curiosity, of wonder, of anticipation. "Good evening," Wes began. "The Council would like to extend its appreciation to all of you for appearing at this impromptu meeting. It has been brought to our attention that there may be an issue regarding the Founders' Day Showcase. Senior Warbler Blaine Anderson, you may have the floor."  
  
Kurt was surprised to see Blaine rise from a chair in the corner - he hadn't even noticed the boy there. Blaine looked at no one, staring instead at the top of Wes's hair with the occasional glance around the top of the room. He appeared calm, and his tone was even as he said, "Thank you. Fellow Warblers, members of the Council, I would like first to-" he cleared his throat, licked his lips as he thought for a moment over his word choice. Kurt hated that all he could think of was the feeling of that tongue on his own lips. "To express my appreciation for all of the confidence you have placed in me, as the lead soloist this year, as well as in my capacity as section leader in previous seasons. As we prepare for our annual Showcase, I understand that a duet is customary, but after having worked with Kurt-"  
  
His eyes flicked down to the carpet, and Kurt almost wished he would look at him. Look at him so he could figure out what in the world was going through Blaine's mind, what he was going to say. Because they hadn't done much  _working_  together and both of them knew it. But what in the world did any of that mean?  
  
"I believe he is ready for a solo of his own. He has proven his talent both in the group, and in our rehearsal sessions-" Kurt wasn't sure how Blaine kept from blushing as he said it; god knows he was, even as he sat a little straighter and stiffer on the couch. "-and I wish, at this point, to withdraw from the number. There's nothing I could teach him," Blaine stated quietly.  
  
At long last, Blaine's eyes scanned the room, searching through the Warblers until he found Kurt and met his eyes. He looked dead inside, Kurt concluded with a nervous flutter in his stomach. Like he was waiting to just vanish off the earth and had stopped caring. It terrified him and left him feeling colder than the look of disgust earlier. "He doesn't need me to hold his hand. I would have nothing of value to contribute."  
  
The room erupted around them, the Council included, and Kurt looked away quickly, unable to take the intense blank stare. "Are you joking?" Thad demanded.  
  
"What prompted this?" Wes's tone was more measured, but still irritable. He didn't like being surprised.  
  
"I just think that it would better serve the group to have Kurt perform on his own. While I understand that it's a tradition for the lead soloist to perform with the heir apparent, and while there is no doubt in my mind that Kurt would serve the Warblers well in that capacity, I don't think it would be wise. We're too much alike." The rest of the group may have been confused by that statement, but Kurt wasn't. While everyone around them chattered about the differences in their tone, their styles, their ranges, Kurt knew exactly what Blaine was saying.  
  
Blaine was getting rid of his part in the duet because he didn't want to be around him. Not when he was...what he was. Not when Blaine was tempted or- or something.   
  
"We're prone to making the same mistakes," Blaine added more quietly, meeting Kurt's eyes for a split-second, and now he felt nauseous.  _Mistake, it was a mistake_  chanted over and over in his brain, beating out a sick tattoo that, coupled with the look from before, made him want to sink into the couch and never be seen again. To take leave to his room and never return.   
  
The mood was broken as David pointed out, "But there's no room for an additional solo, Blaine, you would-"  
  
"I don't care about that," Blaine stated emphatically. "I don't need the spotlight in every performance. I am more than happy to give the song to Kurt and allow him to have the glory for himself."  
  
Kurt didn't want glory - he wanted  _Blaine_. He wanted sweet kisses and the Sound of Music in Blaine's dorm room and would gladly trade that for never performing on-stage again. But that didn't matter now.  
  
"Shall we open the floor to nominations for a second Warbler to take Warbler Blaine's place?" Thad asked. "The arrangement does require two strong leads."  
  
"Let Kurt pick a replacement song," Blaine suggested. "He'll...anything he does will be fantastic. I'm sure of it."  
  
The Council looked at one another, oblivious to the hushed questions flying around the other hahlf of the room, and Wes finally nodded. "That's settled, then. Is there any further business?" When there wasn't, the gavel sounded again and the Council filed out. No one wanted to look like they were swarming Kurt to press him for information, but they all did.  
  
All except Blaine, who slipped out unnoticed and disappeared into the darkened halls of Dalton.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt felt like he should be nervous.   
  
Standing behind the stage and hearing the applause for groups before the Warblers, he knew he should feel like he was going to do something stupid like forget all the words or trip over himself or open his mouth and have no sound come out. It was something he'd feared before when performing in a new setting - during his first competition with the old glee club, in his first competition with the Warblers, the first time he had gotten a prominent role in the community theater production.   
  
The audience was interested, not like one of those groups that felt like they were killing time for the 'real' show to begin, even through a mind-numbing series of speeches by everyone from the Dean of Academics to the oldest living Dalton valedictorian (Jack Spencer, class of 1898; his speech was written in scrawl so large Kurt could read it from backstage and air whistled through the man's false teeth when he spoke). They actually wanted to be there, to celebrate their school and its lengthy - very lengthy - history, and Kurt gathered from the others that the Showcase was always the best-received portion...though on second thought the boys could have been biased. In any event, they were sure to get plenty of attention and pressure, and Kurt was now performing the penultimate number. A solo. His first solo with the Warblers, on an arrangement that they had largely been working on without him because he had been trying to be away from Blaine as much as possible over the previous week.  
  
In fairness, Blaine had been avoiding him as well. It wasn't one-sided; this was definitely mutual.  
  
Still, it felt like he should say something as he saw the Warbler milling around backstage. He had seemed distant with everyone, not just with Kurt, and maybe...maybe something was really wrong. Maybe he really was just scared. Maybe he needed reassurance and Kurt should be trying to help.  
  
His stomach churned as he walked toward Blaine, who was bouncing a little on the balls of his feet as he always did before going onstage. It helped get him ready, get the adrenaline pumping; last time he saw it, Kurt had thought it was cute. Now he thought it was painful. It was painful to watch Blaine try to get ready to go onstage and be charming when Kurt knew how easily he fell for the charm, for the act Blaine could turn on and off like a switch. It was painful to watch Blaine stretch and adjust his uniform when all Kurt could picture was what Blaine looked stretched out over him with his uniform half-off...and what he looked like after as he dashed from the room, pants held up by his clenched fist. It was painful to watch Blaine, any part of Blaine, and know that-...that as much as he wanted the boy, it was never going to happen. Blaine was never going to be his boyfriend now, and that was...well, it was just something he was going to have to learn to live with.  
  
He had lived this long without a boyfriend, he supposed he could survive another year and a half. Just long enough to get out of Ohio. He would get to somewhere safe, somewhere with other people, somewhere Leroy thought was a good place, and he would find someone. He would have what he'd been dreaming of forever, with or without Blaine Anderson.  
  
...But his eyes looked so sad, Kurt realized as he approached. He looked so tired, so sad, and increasingly nervous as he realized Kurt was walking toward him. Maybe...  
  
"Blaine," he murmured more than said, and Blaine shifted on the balls of his feet.  
  
"Kurt," he replied, his voice low and tight.  
  
"Are you...I know I haven't seen you much this week, but are you...okay?"  
  
It was a simple question, a fair question, but one that held no easy answer. There was a pause, then an inhale as Blaine held himself a little straighter and pasted on his pre-show grin. "Fine," he replied, then turned and walked off around the back of the curtain to the opposite wing.  
  
Well. If that was how he was going to respond to this sort of inquiry...that was that, then, Kurt concluded. Obviously they couldn't be friends, not if Blaine wanted that badly to get away from him. He wasn't going to keep chasing.   
  
The Warblers were announced, and they filed on-stage from both sides as they took their places. Bill was so proud as he began "Cherie," a number he had apparently been asking to do for years, and Kurt let him lose himself in the music, in the carefully-layered harmonies and the precise melodic lines that required the utmost attention. Save the occasional glance in Blaine's direction, he kept his eyes where they should have been. There was no room for error, for feelings, in arrangements such as these.  
  
By the time he stepped forward for his solo, he wasn't nervous anymore. For one thing, it wasn't nearly as hard to perform when he wasn't getting up there cold; performing the first two-thirds of the set had helped him get comfortable with the stage, get the audience warmed up, get his voice where it should be. But mostly...it was easy to not be nervous when singing from one's heart. That was the most natural thing in the world - opening up his mouth and singing exactly what he felt.  
  
He carefully descended the risers as the other Warblers began with their background [vocals](http://youtu.be/9dMm3ntKjXk), closing his eyes and drawing in a deep breath. It was a song he'd listened to on the floor of Mercedes' room so many times he couldn't even count, usually chattering through it while they waited to get to something more upbeat and fun, talking about the people they would date one day, about the fantastic places they would go together, about so many things...  
  
...so many things...  
  
When had Kurt started pasting the image of Blaine into all of those things? When had he started wanting to put Blaine in every single frame of his future? He had been foolish, falling so quickly, losing himself almost instantly in the fantasy. And this...this was a song of mourning, befitting the loss of things that never were. Of fantasies he never should have had in the first place.  
  
It was easy to sing from the heart with something like that.  
  
 _Maybe if I pray every night  
You'd come back to me  
And maybe if I cry every day  
You'll come back to stay  
Oh maybe_  
  
His tone was rounder than the original recording, and obviously lower, but no less soulful. No less  _mournful_  as he poured every regret, every rebuke of how stupid he'd been to ever think it was a possibility, every ounce of pain at realizing the things he'd thought he would finally have were merely illusions.  
  
Blaine was captivated by the sadness. By how Kurt managed to sound at once empty and so full of sorrow and pain that he couldn't stand it. By the way the boy sounded as though every single word was being flung from his throat by the sheer force of what he felt as like, if he was forced to stop singing, he would explode from the pressure of all the things he couldn't say.  
  
It was like Judy Garland but bigger. Like the dancers in West Side Story. Like the opposite of how he sang, acting out everything he thought he needed to feel, thought he should feel, trying to channel everything negative into something brighter so he could make himself feel better. This was just abject hurt and despair.  
  
And he had done this.  
  
 _Maybe if I hold your hand  
You will understand  
And maybe if I kiss your lips  
I'll be at your command  
Oh maybe_  
  
Kurt's voice faltered just a bit on the second verse as he thought about it. About holding Blaine's hand, about the way Blaine touched him like no one else had in his entire life. About how warm it had made him feel in his first days at Dalton just-  
  
About how the kiss had made him feel the first time, lying on Blaine's bed and making him think that maybe...It was like all the things he told himself he was silly for wanting had gotten real again. All the things he'd thought he would never be able to have, or that he knew were theoretically possible because Man [#16](https://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%2316) had them but had no idea how to go about getting, had suddenly been moved to within arms' reach and he could start picturing it again.  
  
About how the kisses on the couch had been, how alive they had made his body feel in ways he didn't even know  _existed_. About how much he wanted them again, how desperately he wished that he and Blaine could go back to having whatever it was they'd started to have. Because they kept  _starting_  to have things. They kept beginning to have beginnings, only to have Blaine dash away and that was the part that was getting too tiring. The part where every start was so close to every momentary finish, and even when things stuttered back to life again because Blaine thought it was safe to inch forward, it wasn't the same.   
  
About the look afterwards. After  _that_ , when he had felt so warm and close to Blaine, so nervous and exposed and trying to piece together what had happened and what it meant, and Blaine had looked at him-  
  
Thinking about the last part was starting to eclipse thinking about the previous two, and that bothered him more than it should have.  
  
 _I prayed and prayed to the Lord  
To send you back, my love  
But instead you came to me  
But only in my dreams_  
  
He had done this to Kurt, Blaine realized as he watched the outpouring of emotion in the song. He had done this. He had made Kurt feel like this. This sad. This wrenching. This was his fault.  
  
He kept changing the goalpost on what the worst thing he could do was. First it was existing - being sick, just existing, whether or not he did anything about it. Everything else was just filler, but the  _really_  bad thing was being that deviant. Then it was acting on it - being was okay, he couldn't entirely help how he felt, but he could help acting on it. Then wanting to act on it became a sudden line, with the realization that wanting to do things felt worse than doing them might. Then his ridiculous assertions that Kurt kissing him didn't count as long as he didn't kiss Kurt back, because kissing him back when he'd been kissed before would be the worst thing. Then what they had done.  
  
Then loving him.  
  
But none of those were the worst things he could do in all of these. None of those were signs of complete and all-consuming wickedness like the real worst thing:  
  
He had done this to Kurt. He had made this beautiful, strong, amazing boy feel as horrible as he felt. There was no victory in that, no thrill of revenge as the one who had kept him awake nights in agony was in agony himself; there was no joy in seeing Kurt unhappy. Even if he didn't understand how Kurt could possibly be happy being this way, he wanted that for him.  
  
He needed it for himself almost as much.  
  
Where the sharp suicidal ideations had resided immediately after the tryst on the couch, an aching longing had taken place, one almost as strong as his longing for Kurt: to stop feeling this way. To start feeling better. To stop spending every day wishing the end would come so he could stop being so wrong. To stop hurting so damned much every single day from the time he woke up until the time he finally fell asleep, finding relief only in the dreams that felt good at the time but left him terrified, sick, disgusted with himself.   
  
He didn't want Kurt to feel as bad as he did; he wanted to feel as good as Kurt. He wanted to ask Kurt why he didn't feel shame. Why he didn't run away. Why he could want this and not hate himself for it, because every time Blaine felt himself wanting, longing, wondering, it was quickly subsumed by uncontrollable amounts of rage and hatred and  _anguish_  that Kurt never seemed to feel.  
  
What was his secret? Was he just ignorant to what it was he wanted and why it was so wrong?  
  
Was there any way to recover that ignorance somehow, to set aside everything that hurt so badly?  
  
 _Maybe if I pray every night  
You'd come back to me  
And maybe if I cry every day  
You'll come back to stay  
Oh maybe  
Oh maybe_  
  
Kurt finished the song, his voice ringing out long and clear on the final note. He felt empty. Drained. As though every ounce of everything he'd been feeling had been holding him up and now that it was all out there he could barely stand. The enthusiastic applause reinvigorated him enough to retake his place for the final number - the Council leading them through "Come On Let's Go" (The arrangement was good, but Blaine would have sung it better; Kurt cringed inwardly for thinking that). He barely noticed any of it, fueled only by a combination of adrenaline and complete exhaustion that got him through the number but without any emotion or true enthusiasm.  
  
The Warblers took their bows and rushed offstage, immediately hugging and high-fiving and congratulating each other. The first-time soloists got the bulk of the hugging, and Kurt found himself quickly swept up in a group hug.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
Blaine wasn't sure what made him whisper it in Kurt's ear like that other than the knowledge that no one would be able to hear him in all the post-show praising going on around them, but he had to say it. He had to say it and wanted to ask a thousand things after it, to ask why Kurt could like himself and why he couldn't; why he was such a horrible jerk that he had made Kurt feel like that; if Kurt would forgive him. But the words flew out in a hushed whisper as soon as he felt the boy's narrow torso under his arm and smelled the soft, familiar scent of Kurt's shampoo.  
  
Kurt's eyes flew open, suddenly aware of his surroundings - and, more accurately, who was surrounding him - and he turned back to look at Blaine. The dead look was gone, but the disgust wasn't back. Instead, it was a peculiar combination of earnestness, fear, and sincerity that broke Kurt's heart and made him want so much-  
  
Made him want apartments in New York.  
  
And when in a couple days the look shifted again and Blaine looked at him like he was everything wrong with the world...or decided that he was too afraid again...or that he couldn't do this anymore...  
  
Kurt looked him in the eye and shook his head. He wasn't doing this anymore. He couldn't. Not after everything the past three weeks had been. Not after the previous four months before that. Not after spending the past ten days trying to get that look of disgust out of his head and feeling like every bit of himself he exposed must be vile if  _Blaine_ , of all people, looked at him like  _that_.  
  
No. he wasn't doing this anymore.  
  
With as much calmness and composure as he could muster, he extricated himself from the arms of the other Warblers and walked away.


	24. Chapter 24

  
Blaine had never been the type to single-mindedly pursue things with an unrelenting fervor. He knew people who were like that - attending a prestigious academy where it was a foregone conclusion that the majority of students would go on to attend Ivy League institutions lent itself to knowing a few such intense personalities - and he didn't dislike them, but he never felt like he really understood that kind of drive. More often than not, he felt as though he was riding in the passenger seat while external forces worked on him to move him in one direction or another: his father, his teachers, his fellow Warblers, Kurt...he could assert himself if he needed to, at least on occasion, but for the most part he tried to go along with what others had mapped out for him. When things got too hectic, too frustrating, felt so much larger than life, he would channel it into his music or find a way to use songs to get himself back on track by acting out what he thought he needed to feel, but that was hardly a genuine dogged pursuit of  _anything_ , really. More often than not, he felt as though he had no idea what he was doing, where he was going, what he was meant to seek out next.  
  
Until Kurt wouldn't speak to him.   
  
He wasn't sure when the obsession started, if it was during Kurt's solo at the showcase or if maybe he'd thought about it before. If maybe he'd started wondering why Kurt was okay with things prior to that. He didn't think so - at least, he didn't remember it as anything beyond a passing frustration whenever Kurt would make a move toward him. An exasperated 'Why do I have to be the only one who knows we can't do this?' in the back of his mind before he moved on to panicking about how much he did want it, how he did want to do all the things he knew he shouldn't even be thinking about, let alone want, least of all  _do_. He knew, at the very least, it hadn't been something on his mind after the...after the day he did the series of horrible things. It wasn't until he watched Kurt sing and heard how sad he was, how  _hurt_. How the boy who seemed to have no shame about feeling the way that he did was wrenched not by the illness but by the way Blaine had treated him. And knowing that Kurt wasn't ashamed, wasn't wracked by guilt and terror-  
  
Unless Kurt was a far better actor than even Blaine would have guessed, he wasn't even bothered by his sickness. He didn't spend every minute wishing it would go away, he didn't wake up from dreams every single night feeling like he wanted to die because that was the only way he would ever feel less wrong. He didn't hate himself for not being able to make it go away. He was-...he was happy, even as sick as he was. How was that even possible?   
  
Rather, Kurt had been happy. Not anymore, not after-  
  
Blaine had to get an answer. He needed to know how Kurt was okay, because that was his only chance now. He didn't know how much longer he could take feeling like this, and if he had passed the threshold where even his father - the go-to therapist for treatment of difficult, severe cases in this part of the country - could do anything to help him, then it was either kill himself and end it all...or figure out how Kurt could feel contentment no matter how severe and difficult his case was.  
  
Not that he could know for sure how difficult or severe, just-...From the way Kurt had kept coming to his room, kept making a move to kiss him, kept doing all of the things that Blaine secretly wanted to do but couldn't  _dare_ , couldn't let himself want...it felt like he wanted it just as much. Maybe more.   
  
Probably not more, Blaine concluded. Not the way he had practically thrown himself on Kurt in the Commons that day. Not the way Kurt was avoiding him now as though he never wanted to see him again, let alone repeat anything they had previously done.  
  
Blaine wanted to. He wanted it all the time. He wanted everything they had done and then some, he wanted every last disgustingly hot thing his dreams could conjure up.   
  
The urges were perpetual now, the ache  _constant_  as though feeling Kurt half-naked beneath him had released a floodgate of hormones and emotions and misfired neurons that made him crave everything he had previously been able to bottle up. Like if a person started crying after holding it in for a long time and couldn't stop. Everything he knew was off-limits was suddenly so much harder to repress, to deny, to tell himself wasn't worth how sick it meant he was.  
  
Which meant he really was beyond help. Which  _really_  meant that Kurt's self-acceptance was his only hope. If he could figure out how-...how to see this illness as something livable, the way that some men who had lost legs in the War no longer saw it as a handicap but as a simple part of their existence that didn't doom them to a life locked away from the rest of the world...if he could get to that point, then maybe... _maybe_...  
  
...maybe he could keep living a little longer. Because maybe then it wouldn't hurt this much just to exist. If he had something to hold onto, some reason that he could feel a little bit better...like Kurt did. Like Kurt had, anyway, before he'd ruined him.  
  
As if he didn't have enough guilt in the first place.  
  
So he had to get answers. He had to figure out a way to ask the questions such that he could get the answers he needed, and he needed to figure out a way to get Kurt to speak to him long enough to answer them - and to have a proper apology.   
  
The latter was proving more difficult than the former.  
  
Kurt wouldn't speak to him. Wouldn't  _look_  at him. Had almost tripped over him four times at Warbler practice because he was that seemingly-determined to not look anywhere near him. And he understood why, he understood that what he'd done was...was unforgivable for so many reasons. He just-...he needed Kurt to forgive him anyway. Or at least to look at him long enough to answer the questions that were driving him more crazy by the moment.  
  
He tried to corner the boy after practice, but Kurt shot out of the room like he'd heard Connie Francis tickets were going on sale down the block and he had to be the first one in line. Blaine practically shoved Jeff aside to get through the doors to see Kurt walking quickly down the hall, with as much grace and poise as any person he'd ever seen but still making it very clear to all the world that he was not stopping. That he would not pause for anything, and most certainly not for conversation.  
  
"Kurt!"  
  
Blaine's voice echoed through the corridor, bouncing off hundred-year-old murals and past antique windows and sounding impossibly loud even against the dull roar of post-rehearsal conversation. He didn't realize how loud it would sound, how much it would stand out, and from the way everyone fell silent and stared at him- he cringed. It lasted only a moment, though, as Kurt turned slowly to stare at him, eyes narrow with frustration and thinly-veiled contempt. The boy's eyebrow raised in a 'what do  _you_  want?' expression, and Blaine tried to think of what precisely he could say here and now that would prove compelling enough for Kurt not to turn back around and keep walking but not give himself - or both of them - away to the rest of the Warblers, who now looked on at their de facto leader as though he had lost his mind from too much furniture-jumping.   
  
Lacking anything to say that might help him but more determined than ever, he chose action over words and jogged to catch up to Kurt, his loafer slipping slightly as he pushed off. Kurt was already off and walking again by the time Blaine caught up, and he doggedly kept pace. Damn, did Kurt ever walk fast when he wanted to get away from someone. He wondered if maybe this wasn't Kurt trying to get away from him, just making him work for the attention; the boy could be kind of dramatically snobbish sometimes, maybe-  
  
"Go away, Blaine."  
  
Well then. That answered that question.  
  
He wanted to assent, on one hand. He wanted to be respectful where he clearly hadn't been a week ago, to give Kurt his space and his privacy. Maybe Kurt didn't want to talk about any of this any more than he would have wanted to a week ago. Maybe Kurt wanted to forget he had ever felt this way. But on the other hand...The feeling that he would lose his mind if he couldn't figure out a better way to deal with all of this - and  _fast_  - was steadily increasing, gnawing at him harder and harder until it felt like he was just a bundle of loose ends that couldn't stop bouncing. He couldn't sleep, he could barely eat, he couldn't be alone with himself because he wasn't sure whether to kill himself or masturbate, or to masturbate and then kill himself from shame. He had to do something about this and that meant he couldn't go away.  
  
"I can't."  
  
That wasn't the answer Kurt was looking for; his eyes narrowed further and his pretty face settled into a hardened glare as he glanced disdainfully at Blaine out of the corner of his eye. "You can. Do."  
  
"No, Kurt, you don't understand. I can't. I can't just go away, I need to-" The flurry of words that threatened were halted as they passed two sophomore boys. Blaine didn't know them, he didn't think Kurt knew them either, but their presence was enough to send an icy claw of fear clamping down on his stomach. They couldn't do this here. Someone would hear them. "Come to my room."  
  
"No." Kurt's response was cold, forceful, thrust from his mouth with an uncharacteristic anger.  
  
"Please." He restrained himself form making a pleading motion with his hands, but only just. "I need to talk to you. Come to my room for a minute."   
  
Kurt stopped walking and turned to look at him for a moment. A hint of curiosity flickered across his face before Kurt clamped down on it, returning to the hard looked that neither expected nor volunteered anything. Blaine's heart leapt when he saw it, just the slightest hint of something that might let him in - just a tiny bit. Just enough for an apology to get him a little further in, because he genuinely was sorry. That had to count for something, didn't it? Kurt crossed his arms firmly over his torso and replied in a tight, high voice, "Fine."  
  
He sounded cold, but it was a start.  
  
The icy demeanor hadn't dissipated by the time they arrived at Blaine's room. "Well," he said as Blaine closed and locked the door behind them - sometimes students wandered into or out of other people's rooms, and they were a school that didn't discourage such action in the interest of being informal with fellow students and fostering a sense of comaraderie, but the last thing Blaine wanted was for anyone to potentially interrupt...or worse, to slip the door open unnoticed and listen until enough juicy bits of information had been revealed that they could make a killing off the blackmail potential alone. "At least you can't run this time. Or if you do, you have to come back eventually."  
  
There was bitterness in Kurt's voice, but it just barely covered the hurt, and Blaine cringed. He had done this. The frozen tundra spanning all four feet of distance between them was his fault, him and his stupid- Well...not entirely stupid. What else was he supposed to have done? Other than ignoring the urges entirely, other than somehow stopping them from happening or stopping himself from wanting the things he wanted...and if he could've done that earlier, he would have, for everyone's sake.  
  
"So," Kurt said in a crisp voice. "What do you want, Blaine?"  
  
Why hadn't it occurred to him until this moment that he would need to be able to actually ask something? There were no words to adequately express what he wanted, no mantra he could repeat over and over again until it somehow materialized, and not even a nice, concrete question he could just ask and put out there. He didn't know what he was supposed to be asking, but there was nothing he could come up with that would even come close to conveying what he needed to.  
  
"I..." He hesitated when words disappeared and tried to start again. "Kurt, I don't know how to..."  
  
Kurt took a step backwards, but his voice softened as he asked, "How to what?", as though every move away from cold indifference had to be paired with a physical move away from the boy who had hurt him. Blaine's heart ached at the thought, which just made it harder to try to find what he wanted to say. It needed to be right, to be easily understood, to be precisely the right question because he might only get one. There was nothing keeping Kurt here except him and he wasn't going to hold the boy hostage or refuse to let him leave, but by the same token...Kurt couldn't leave. Kurt needed to stay and help him and- and how was he supposed to figure out a lifetime's worth of questions and boil them all down to just one?  
  
"Why don't you hate yourself?"  
  
The question seemed to come out of nowhere, flung into the middle of the room so suddenly that neither of them was entirely sure what to say in response. Blaine tried speaking first, since it was his ridiculous, loaded question out there, but it came out a nearly incoherent babble. "I don't know how to do this, what the right way is to-...you are who you are and unless you're much better an actor than I would have guessed, you don't hate it. You don't try to pretend you don't want me and I tried and I  _can't_ , so why don't you-"  
  
Kurt drew in a slow breath, and Blaine stopped in case that was a sign Kurt wanted to take mercy on him and answer the question. He felt as though all his well-practiced poise, all the social grace that had been trained into him from such an early age, had been replaced by a froth of frustrating questions he couldn't put words to that kept turning his stomach into tighter and tighter knots until it hurt to breathe, to move, to  _exist_. "Why should I?" Kurt's voice was quiet, the look in his eyes distrustful. But he was speaking, that was a start. "Why should I? Why do you?"  
  
"Why wouldn't I?" Blaine asked. Ordinarily he would have thought answering a question with a question was ridiculous, but he didn't know how to answer it any other way. "Wouldn't anyone?"  
  
"Look, Blaine, as much fun as this would be to just keep going around and around on this conversation here - where I say 'I don't' and ask why you do again, and so on - I have other things to do, so if this was all you wanted to talk about-"  
  
"It's not," Blaine stated firmly. When Kurt stared at him expectantly, waiting for what else he did want to talk about then, Blaine began quietly, "First of all, I wanted to apologize." His words were working for that much, at least, which he took to be a good sing. "I hurt you, and there's no...there's an excuse for that, but not a good one. I'm sorry, Kurt." He tried to meet the boy's eyes - his beautiful, entrancing eyes - but Kurt glanced away, first rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling then looking down at the floorboard near the door, arms crossed more tightly over his chest. "I should never have done what I did to you."  
  
There was a hesitation, then Kurt asked quietly, "Which part?"  
  
"Running out," Blaine stated first, then amended, "All of it. But running out was what hurt you. The rest just made us both more sick, but I guess that's..." He didn't know how to finish that sentence. 'To be expected'? 'Inevitable'? 'Yet another thing we can add to the list of what's wrong with me, be sure to tell my psychiatrist that when I'm institutionalized'? Because in a way it was inevitable, wasn't it? It was what happened when someone who was sick spent time around someone else who was sick, it was...even with something that wasn't directly and pathologically contagious, there was a spreading factor for moral illnesses, too. And the temptation had been so great, just knowing that unlike one of the other guys Kurt wouldn't hurt him for wanting, wouldn't report him to anyone because it would mean having to report himself.  
  
Let alone once he knew how amazing Kurt was in his own right.  
  
The warm wave of  _want_  that still passed through him made him feel like he couldn't breathe. He really was helpless to it, wasn't he? And yet he couldn't figure out the questions to ask to get answers to any of it. All he'd managed to figure out was that indeed Kurt didn't care that he was sick; the 'why' remained a mystery.  
  
He half-choked on an odd wheeze that was closer to a sob than he would've liked as he finally finished the statement "...just what happens with this kind of illness, I guess. This severe, at least."  
  
"We're not sick, Blaine." Kurt's voice was quiet but not soft, with a kind of sadness to it as though he wished this could all be different. "No more than anyone else."  
  
Blaine had almost been prepared for an explanation of learning to live with illness, of acceptance of one's disease as an integral - but non-fatal - part of life, but this-...the revelation that it wasn't actually a sickness at all-  
  
He couldn't believe it. It didn't make any  _sense_  - of course it was a sickness. It was in the DSM, it was taught in medical school, it was a pathological disease of the brain like- like depression or anxiety or schizophrenia. It was treatable, it was  _treated_. Just because it was difficult to cure didn't mean it wasn't an illness, just like terminal cancer was still an illness. "Of course we are," he said slowly, his voice sounding strange in his ears. Distant. Was it maybe- Oh god, Kurt really didn't know. He'd wondered if maybe that was why Kurt could accept any of this without the enormous levels of guilt, but he hadn't really believed that the boy could be that ignorant of his situation - of  _their_  situation. "Kurt, I...I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but this...what we are, it isn't-"  
  
"First of all, there is no 'we'," Kurt stated with a firmness that suggested he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Blaine. "Second of all, we aren't. There's nothing wrong with us. There's-" He drew in a deep breath and took a step forward, gingerly smoothing Blaine's lapel. The feeling of fingertips against his chest made Blaine's breath catch and it took everything in him not to grab Kurt, to hold him closer as he tried to understand all of it - all of this, all the longing and the feelings that were so much stronger than lust and how in the world could Kurt say this was fine? It felt horrible.   
  
"It's not normal," Blaine whispered. It couldn't be, and not just because that would mean that everyone around him was secretly harbouring these same feelings. It couldn't be normal because he refused to believe that everyone else he'd ever seen was this miserable.  
  
Maybe they were. They hid everything else, didn't they?   
  
Kurt stiffened, glancing to the side. " _Normal_  is overrated, Blaine, normal is boring. This...this may not be common, but it's not wrong." He finally looked Blaine in the eye as he whispered, "You're not wrong."  
  
He hated looking Blaine in the eye. Hated seeing him and wanting him and wanting  _things_  with him - wanting a life. Wanting soft kisses while they listened to beautiful, grander-than-life songs. Wanting Blaine to touch him in spite of every single ounce of better judgment he had. But Blaine looked so sad, so scared, so  _confused_  by it all, as though he couldn't fathom any of this ever being okay.  
  
And as much as he wanted to write the boy off because of it, as much as he was trying to remind himself that Blaine's reluctance to accept it meant that there was no way this could end in anything other than heartbreak and being half-naked on a couch with a look of disgust burning its way into his memory...no one should have to feel like Blaine looked. No one should have to be that hopeless.  
  
"Come with me," he urged quietly.  
  
"Where?" Blaine asked nervously.  
  
"There's something I want to show you. In the library," he added. It sounded surprisingly intimate, like he was exposing some deep, private part of himself. In a way he knew that was ridiculous - it was a report, it was a study that had been published and anyone who went looking for it could find it. Blaine could go find it himself if he knew where to look and wasn't so terrified.  
  
But it was deeper than that, he knew. It wasn't  _just_  a report, it was so much bigger, more important.  
  
The library was not as empty as Blaine would have liked; that much was obvious from the moment they stepped inside and Kurt could almost sense Blaine drawing up a little straighter, walking a little prouder, trying to make himself seem a little more together while at the same time attempting to put on a ridiculous air of nonchalance that practically screamed "Don't look at me! I'm not doing anything, I swear, but don't look!"  
  
"Okay, you have to relax," Kurt said quietly with a faint smile and a shake of his head. "I've been here plenty of times and no one has ever noticed - not even the time I knocked over the chair and ran into the wall," he added with a chuckle to himself. Blaine looked at him like he was crazy, too on-edge to find humour even in Kurt's panicked clumsiness, so Kurt simply led him to the reference section. From memory he moved quickly through the stacks and plucked the report off the shelf, his fingers clutching it tightly out of instinct.   
  
"What's that?" Blaine asked as Kurt ran his fingers slowly over the familiar binding; there was an almost Pavlovian comfort response, like the sight of the teddy bear he'd slept with as a child - something reassuring, like this was what meant everything was okay.  
  
"Proof," Kurt stated with a faint smile. It was and it wasn't; it was and it was so much more than that. It was hope, it was the security blanket that had gotten him through the three months between putting a name to his difference and meeting Hiram and Leroy. It had taken him from terrified and despondent and thinking he would always be wrong and alone and miserable, from honestly contemplating castration to cure himself, to imagining a future that didn't just entice him, that wasn't just happy and liberating, but one that made  _sense_  to him in ways that everything he'd previously envisioned never had.   
  
"Of what?"   
  
Of everything, Kurt wanted to reply but didn't. Instead he led Blaine to the small table in the back corner, the one where he had pored over medical books until he found his overblown diagnosis, and sat down. "It's a study," he started, and Blaine shot him a look as he sat down, glancing nervously over his shoulders. "It's a study," he began again in a quieter voice, and Blaine looked just a little calmer. "A psychologist at UCLA studied two groups of men - half homosexual, half not. And what they found was that there's no difference. None. They weren't any more crazy, any more likely to be depressed, any more likely to have problems. They weren't sick, Blaine, the only reason anyone thought that was because they were homosexual and that's technically a medical condition, but she even said-" He flipped open to the passage he was looking for; he had it practically memorized now, he'd read the study so often. It wasn't long, only thirty pages, but it held so much. So much promise. "That if they bracketed the fact that the homosexual was, well, a homosexual, there was no mental illness whatsoever. You see?" he pointed to it as he slid the study across the table toward Blaine. "We're not sick. This proves it. We may not be like everyone else, but honestly - if that were how I counted my life, I would've been disappointed a long time ago."   
  
He sat back in his chair, satisfied with himself. This was what Blaine needed. There. He'd done...something. He wasn't sure he could put his finger on what precisely, it wasn't quite fixing Blaine because there was nothing  _wrong_  with him - not per se. It was almost like he'd just pointed Blaine in the right direction.  
  
He wasn't sure why that meant he was starting to let the fantasies creep in again.  
  
He knew it was irrational. Blaine had hurt him, and even though he had apologized Kurt was still wary. But at the same time, there was a part of him that wondered if maybe this had been the key. If maybe this was the real problem, and now that he'd helped fix it, maybe Blaine could stop being so skittish. They might have a real shot now, the kind Kurt would envision whenever Blaine wasn't too busy running away because he'd crept too far past some invisible line in the sand. Maybe now things could be different, now that Blaine knew.  
  
And even if they couldn't, at the very least he had given comfort to his friend, someone he cared a lot about. He knew how amazing it had felt to find the report, to find Man #16. He wondered which of the men in the report Blaine might be able to see himself in, to see a future. Maybe Man #50, who placed emphasis on being ordinary and like others but channeled all his differences rather than repressing them - like Blaine and his music. With tenderness but that was subjugated by phallic gratification - that sounded familiar. He thought so, at least. Maybe he should've studied the criteria a little more.  
  
He may have read the report a few too many times if he knew all of the men specified in the report by their number and classifications. He couldn't help himself; it was reassuring. And what other examples did he have to look to before Hiram and Leroy? Where else was he going to find information?  
  
Blaine shook his head gravely. "It doesn't work like that, Kurt."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"You can't just say that decades of science are wrong because you don't like what it says. I wish-" He sighed, resting his forehead in his hand. "I wish it was, but thirty subjects that are meticulously hand-selected don't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. For a study like this you have to have literally hundreds of people, and you can't just take the people who say they aren't sick. It's a skewed sample."  
  
Kurt stared at him, surprised by what he was hearing. Blaine should be over the moon. He should be singing excited songs that made Kurt want to kiss him and never let him out of his sight. He should be jumping up and down on furniture with joy right about now - why wasn't he jumping on furniture? Why was he sitting heavily in his chair and sighing and shaking his head like it was all an elaborate lie aimed at hurting him? "So is every study that says that we're inherently sick," he replied. "They're taking their samples from insane asylums and prisons, of course there's a presumption of mental illness. They're selecting people who are in treatment, it's obvious-"  
  
"That's not the way science works."  
  
"Yes it is," he replied, eyebrows lowering in frustration and confusion. "You find a flaw in the theory, or in the methodology used to get that theory, and you do another experiment. You look for something else, a new theory. You abandon the old, or you modify it - you studied astronomy when you took physics last year, you learned about Galileo-"  
  
"We're not talking about something millions of miles away that we lack the ability to track scientifically. This is observable, it's- it's been observed by psychotherapists for half a century now and every single one of them until this random woman in California have come to the same conclusion. What gives you the right to come in and decide this is what's right?"  
  
Kurt was practically seething as Blaine ripped the report apart, practically shredding the security blanket he'd clung to for what seemed like a hundred years. Obviously Blaine didn't need his help, then, if this was how he was going to react to it. How he was going to respond. He'd thought he could do something, but obviously Blaine wasn't ready. "What gives you the right to say it's wrong?" He stood, pushing away from the table. "I'm sorry you've been so miserable, but maybe  _this_  right here is why you hate yourself. And it's why I don't." Shaking his head tightly as he turned to leave, he added, "Do with it whatever you want. But it's why I know I'm not wrong. I'm not sick. Man #16 was like me, and now he has a life and he's happy, and I will be too. And you can't take that from me."


	25. Chapter 25

  
Kurt was in the middle of a semi-ridiculous dream about singing cats tap-dancing their way around New York City when he heard pounding at the door. First three solid raps that made him sit bolt upright in bed, looking around to try to cobble together some semblance of where he was and what time it was. The clock on his nightstand was difficult to read in the moonlight, but he could tell the hour was just before 4. There was silence for a moment save the quiet patter of rain outside the closed window, then several more heavy thuds on the door in quick succession, growing increasingly frantic.  
  
Was there a fire? An emergency of some kind? An impending nuclear attack such that they were meant to hide under their beds? He hopped out of bed, his heart pounding as he grabbed his robe and tried to shrug it on while walking. He yanked open the door to find a rain-soaked, disheveled Blaine on the other side, breathing hard, face rosy pink with cold and exertion and an emotion Kurt couldn't quite read in this light. "Blaine-"  
  
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't be over here so late, you were asleep, I just-...I know you're angry with me. I shouldn't-"  
  
"Blaine?" Sam's confused, sleepy voice came from the bed where he was still tucked under a heap of blankets.  
  
Blaine looked trapped, panicked as though it suddenly had occurred to him that Kurt wasn't the only one in his room, that Kurt didn't have the single like he did by virtue of his year, and he shifted onto his back foot as though preparing to leave...but never quite moved. "You're soaked," Kurt pointed out quietly. Blaine looked like a drowned rat -a drowning, terrified rodent searching so hard for any way off the sinking ship that he was about to start running aimlessly into walls in the hope of hitting a hole somewhere.   
  
"Yeah, it's raining," Blaine replied, stating the obvious as if it was news to him.   
  
Kurt wanted to turn him away. To tell him that he'd had his chances and he was done. To tell Blaine that if he tried to destroy one more dream he would no longer even be counted among friends. But he looked too pathetic, too scared, too desperate for something to hold onto, and while Kurt had been accused of being heartless by many of his fellow students at McKinley, there was something about Blaine that made it impossible to stay genuinely upset with him. Kurt hated that part even if he couldn't hate the boy. "Come in and get dry," he urged quietly. "You'll get caught breaking curfew if you go back." Or if he kept standing around, Kurt added silently. How Blaine gotten over in the first place, he had no idea. He thought about asking but guessed Blaine wouldn't be coherent enough to give him a real response to that.   
  
"What's going on?" Sam asked, fumbling for his glasses as he sat up part-way and looked blearily in the direction of the door as Kurt pulled Blaine gently by the wrist into the room and closed the door behind him.  
  
"Nothing, Sam, go back to sleep," Kurt whispered, nudging Blaine in the direction of the bathroom as he went to his bureau.  
  
"Blaine, are you okay?"  
  
There was silence for a moment, both of them staring at the surprise visitor. Kurt knew no answer he could give would suffice at the moment, but he wasn't entirely sure whether Blaine was in a place where he could come up with something that would put Sam's mind at ease in his current state - not as shaken as he looked. Kurt wondered if Sam could see the way Blaine drew in a deep breath before he stood a little straighter and plastered on his most confident smile. In an instant he went from seeming frantic to being the Warbler everyone knew, trusted, and admired. "I'm fine," Blaine replied, and Kurt almost cringed as he realized that a few months ago he would have believed that. Sam certainly seemed to. "Go back to sleep, I'll just get dried off and camp out here until curfew ends." Sam nodded and laid back down, but Blaine didn't let his guard back down right away.  
  
"Go start drying off, I'll get you clothes," Kurt instructed quietly, and Blaine disappeared into the bathroom. By the time Kurt had selected a pair of pajama and grabbed an extra towel from the closet, he expected Blaine would have stripped out of his wet clothes so he kept his eyes trained on the ceiling as he pushed open the bathroom door, light spilling out into the dorm room before he shut it behind him. "If you lay your clothes over the-"  
  
Blaine was still clothed, wet garments sticking to him awkwardly, as he paced through the small bathroom - back and forth in front of the shower, with a sloshing sound on each step and a quiet squeak of his wet shoes as he turned. "You know, things like that aren't just wrong, they're irresponsible."  
  
"What are?" Kurt asked, confused. He held the clothes and towel in Blaine's direction, but the boy was too busy pacing and looking troubled to notice them or respond. After a second attempt to hand them over went ignored, Kurt set the folded items on the edge of the sink and continued to watch.  
  
"The report," Blaine stated, and Kurt crossed his arms defensively over his chest.   
  
"Did you seriously wake me up in the middle of the night after coming over here - in the pouring rain, I might add - just to dash my dreams some more?" he asked dryly. He had expected Blaine might not be willing to talk about these things, but more and the more he just seemed  _cruel_. Not at all like the nice, sweet guy Kurt had thought he was. Certainly no better than Finn or any of his friends - at least they were honest about their contempt for him, unlike Blaine who would swoop in and destroy everything he could before he swooped back out again and left a path of destruction in his wake.   
  
"That's it," Blaine replied, turning to face him finally as he stopped pacing. "That's exactly what I'm saying. You have dreams now, because of it. You rely on reports like that to tell you that you're not sick, that you're-...that you're okay and you can be normal and have things that you want, but the fact is that isn't  _true_ , Kurt, it can't-" He swallowed hard, looking away for a moment before concluding, "It can't happen like that, it never..."  
  
He wanted things now, he wanted them so much, and the report just made him want them  _more_. He wanted things that were fundamentally incompatible with one another - he wanted boys but he wanted to blend in. He wanted boys but he wanted to be healthy. He wanted to live a productive, happy life but also wanted things that would guarantee him a life of misery, poverty, sickness, being shunned from every corner of society. He wanted Kurt, but he wanted so badly to stop feeling crazy, and Kurt...Kurt made him feel that way. Kurt made him feel like he was losing his mind, losing control, losing every semblance of who he was supposed to be because when the boy smiled at him - let alone when he  _sang_ , oh god...  
  
"I never happens like that, Kurt." He tried to keep his voice even, but it trembled. "The people who are sick like we are...they don't get to be like the people in those reports. They either get better, or they live out their lives in agony. They either fight their-  _our_  disease, and they learn to like the women their parents choose for them, and they do what they're meant to have done the entire time, or they spend their entire lives being miserable. Things like this report, they don't tell the whole story. It's political, it's an attempt to make people think that there's  _any_  hope for something better."  
  
He hated that it worked. That it made him think for a second, for just a fleeting moment that maybe- But he knew otherwise. He knew too much and he almost hated Kurt for not hating it. ...Not really, he couldn't hate the boy, not really, but almost. He hated that Kurt could be naive enough to believe in the kinds of things the report was painting as possible. That wasn't the way it worked in the real world, it was just what men were reporting. Men who were flagrantly stating that they weren't sick just because they didn't want to admit to it. Men who were at least a little bit delusional if they thought there even  _was_  such a thing as a homosexual marriage let alone that they could be entitled to something like that. Men who were, by definition, incredibly ill individuals who had severe impairments and therefore couldn't be trusted to adequately or accurately represent their status.   
  
He had known of men like that, men who came to his father as difficult cases. Severe, difficult cases who didn't want to change and didn't think there was anything wrong with them, but there was. They were just as diseased as the rest of the patients - more, really, because they didn't even have enough of a sense of reality to know-  
  
Why couldn't he got a day without finding some symptom that meant he was even more of a lost cause than he thought?  
  
But these men, they talked about wanting a husband like they were women. They talked about being happy when men smiled lecherously at them. They talked about playing with feminine toys and feeling no shame about it.   
  
(Blaine had hidden his toy horse, with his long soft mane and little doll in English riding gear, in the back of his closet after that and tried to never think about it again, how much he'd liked making pretend jumps out of the end of his bed. He felt plenty of shame whenever he did, and guilt for having not felt shame at first, which meant he must be all right after all.)  
  
The men in those reports didn't get happy endings. The only ones who did were the ones who sought treatment, and weren't beyond help, and the rest...the ones like he was now...  
  
"Because there is," Kurt stated quietly, his voice firm. "There is hope, Blaine, we...find somewhere else. We find places where there are other people like us, and we live our lives."  
  
He shook his head, going back to pacing. "It isn't that simple, I- I wish you understood that, that I didn't have to try and explain it to you. Because if you knew what I knew...I wish you were right, I honestly do, I wish you could be right about any of that-"  
  
"Why can't I?" Kurt replied. "Who says?"  
  
"Everyone."  
  
"And how do they know? Most people don't even know we exist, how do they know what we are or aren't capable of having? Most of the people around here have never even left the state, how do they know what there might be out there for us? In California or New York or Washington?"  
  
"Because they're medical professionals," Blaine replied, frustrated. Why didn't Kurt get it? Why did he keep trying to justify his own failure to reason like that? Why couldn't Kurt just accept that life was the way it was, even as unfair as it was, and move on already? Why did he keep having to try and-  
  
Why couldn't he just play by the rules like everyone else? Settle down with Rachel and learn to be happy? Build a home and a family and a life and suppress everything the way adults were meant to do? Why couldn't Kurt just be normal and accept it and stop trying to convince him?  
  
Wasn't his willpower being tested enough just with Kurt  _looking_  that way, let alone talking about things like that?  
  
"So is Dr. Hooker," Kurt stated. He sat on the floor beside the toilet, looking tired of the conversation in so many ways. His eyes were narrowed slightly as he studied Blaine, his posture stiff but naturally-so, his arms wrapped around his knees in such a way that Blaine could see the little pop of a vein in his forearm against the dark silk of Kurt's pajamas, and he looked... _quiet_. Still. Confident enough that he didn't need to fight him tooth and nail because he knew what he knew and that was enough.  
  
Why did he get to be so confident in that? Why didn't he even have to  _question_  it?   
  
Why did he have to be so damned beautiful? So strong and confident and  _attractive_  that it felt like Blaine was being pulled in by some magnetic force he couldn't fight anymore?   
  
"Blaine." Kurt's voice was soft as he looked up at him, and all Blaine could think of was how pale and creamy his skin looked next to the white porcelain tiles. "Why did you come over here tonight?" When he didn't immediately have an answer, Kurt added, "Because - and I say this more-or-less fondly - you woke me up at almost 4 on a school night, and you do have your own bathroom to pace in. And you don't strike me as the kind of person who insists on having the same argument multiple times, so I doubt it's that you came over because you needed to tell me I was wrong again."  
  
"You are," Blaine snapped automatically, and Kurt raised his eyebrows and held out his hands, palms up, as if to say 'then leave already.'  
  
But he couldn't.  
  
He should, he knew that, especially because the urges to do something -  _anything_  - were always stronger when he was in Kurt's physical presence. But if Kurt really was wrong, if the only thing that was giving Kurt comfort was  _wrong_...  
  
...then what hope did he have left?   
  
As wrong as the report was, it was all he had. As wrong as Kurt was, as naive as his assumptions might be, as uniformed as he was about the true nature of the world and their affliction, as much as Kurt had no idea what their lives were really going to hold...without it, he was back to where he'd been before the Showcase. He was back to being in a position where literally the only thing that would keep him from feeling like this was killing himself and he didn't-...he didn't know that he wanted to.   
  
He didn't want to actually  _die_ , he just wanted life to stop feeling like this.   
  
He could feel tears starting to prick at the back of his eyes, and he loathed them. What good did they do anyway? What were they but a sign of complete weakness and submission to everything that was challenging him? They were a sign of giving in, of giving  _up_ , and he couldn't-  
  
"I can't help if you won't let me." Kurt's voice was barely a whisper, but it felt like it was echoing through the bathroom, out into the dorm room, where everyone could hear but no one could do anything.  
  
"You can't," Blaine murmured back, shaking his head and staring at the ceiling and trying to will himself to not do something pathetic like start crying now because what good would that do? It would only make him feel worse and embarrass them both.  
  
"Why not? I want to."  
  
Blaine almost asked why, because after the past few days he couldn't imagine any reason for Kurt to be even remotely charitable toward him, but instead he sank down slowly against the bathroom wall, shivering at the feeling of the cold tile through his soaked-through shirt. "Because it isn't that simple," he replied. "You-" His breath caught as he tried to speak before he managed to stutter out, "You  _scare_  me, Kurt. You make me feel all of these things so intensely. I've wanted things before, wanted this, I've always known I was sick, but you make it all so much  _harder_. I could stop it before, but ever since I met you it's just gotten so much worse, so much more severe, and more  _difficult_. I thought maybe...maybe if I could figure out why you were okay with all of this, why you didn't walk around looking like you want to hide from it, that I could feel better. But that report..."  
  
"What about it?" He could see Kurt's eyes shining at this distance, see the faint dark shadow against the skin of his pale cheek, and from here he looked almost more handsome than beautiful. It made Blaine feel worse.   
  
"It doesn't talk about how to feel better about being sick, it just says we aren't and leaves it at that. But I can't believe that. I- I wish I could. It would be so,  _so_  much easier if I could, but we are."  
  
"Why not?" Kurt's question was more insistent this time, and Blaine wasn't sure why he just kept asking. The answer was always going to be the same.  
  
"Because I've seen them," he said finally. "I know how their lives turn out. They might start out thinking things are fine - many of them do. Many of them think they can just go along with no one knowing, but something happens. Either someone finds out, or they get arrested at some disgusting spot where they congregate and thrown in jail, their name dragged through the mud when the newspaper prints their photograph and their name, or a coworker sees them and they get fired, or they lose their entire family and end up living homeless in the park all winter. Then they go to people like my father and he does what he can but it's-" He swallowed hard, thinking about it. His father glossed over it like it was nothing, like treatment was as matter-of-fact as a teacher mentioning he had given a test that day, but it wasn't. It was gruesome, it was  _barbaric_  and painful, like pulling out teeth or cutting out tumours without anesthesia. It was necessary but torturous. If it worked, then it was worth it, but with decreasing success rates and an increasing patient load, there were so many more people out there who had undergone it, who had tried to get better and failed. "-not as effective as it once was."  
  
No one was sure why. His father claimed it was because of the War, because when men were left with no women for months during their formative years, it warped their minds and made it more difficult to function properly in society like they were meant to. Blaine had wondered what that meant about places like Dalton. He'd had the impunity to ask, concerned for his own welfare - at 14 and just beginning to feel these unwanted things - and was met with swift condemnation. Of course these sorts of school weren't breeding grounds for that kind of illness; they made boys into Men just as long as those boys knew the path they should tread.  
  
Knowing and being able to were two different things, but Blaine hadn't been dumb enough to say that, even then.  
  
"But the entire point is that we don't need treated," Kurt pointed out. His words and tone were deliberate, head leaning forward as he said them as if he wanted to physically press the idea into Blaine's head with his own somehow.   
  
"It's still an illness," Blaine replied. "Any justifications you try to use about why it's not that bad, it's still an illness. We're still sick."  
  
"Because psychotherapists have classified it that way. There are plenty of things that are considered a disease, considered  _wrong_ , before we understand them. Left-handedness has been beaten out of kids for years before scientists started figuring out it was doing them more damage and now only the fringe Catholics do it. People thought redheads were witches for centuries. Just because they think we're sick now doesn't mean there's actually anything wrong with us."  
  
Kurt said it so matter-of-factly, so  _logically_. There was no earnestness, no desperate desire to convince them both. He didn't need convincing, Blaine realized. He already  _knew_  it, he wasn't trying to force himself into thinking he was right. He could just  _know_  that sometimes people were wrong, that sometimes even doctors were wrong, and could just  _accept_  that. Blaine couldn't fathom it. He couldn't imagine just accepting that sometimes everything you've heard your entire life is more fake than you thought. Is outright wrong.   
  
If this was wrong, what else might be? What other things he'd thought he had known were just figments of the not-very-creative imaginations of men like his father?  
  
He didn't even know what to say. When he didn't respond, Kurt continued - pushing a little further this time, pressing him. "Is it right that Mercedes and I have to go to two different schools?"  
  
"Of course not," he replied immediately, because it wasn't. He couldn't understand the people who thought it was, who honestly believed that people of different skin colours were so foreign to one another that they couldn't even go to the same school or sit on the same bus without society falling down around them. Those who thought the natural order of things was to be completely isolated from one other based on something so at once arbitrary and immutable baffled him.  
  
"And are you actually worth any less as a person because of your family's background?"  
  
In the context of the previous question, Blaine didn't need to ask which part of the background he meant. He started to reply with an immediate negative response, emphatic as he remembered the comments and jokes and things he'd overheard at his old school. The way his former classmates would have treated him differently had they known, the way they made assumptions that divided him from his cousins...they were wrong. Of course they were.   
  
But his father wouldn't agree with that, would he?   
  
His father spent his entire life trying to stop being even remotely Asian, and not just around other people. Not just around people who might have preconceived notions or have prejudices that would harm his ability to be a valued member of society and a professional businessman who had to rely on word-of-mouth and reputation to gather a client base. Blaine could understand that part; he could understand trying to be something palatable around people who needed to have a high opinion of you. They all did that, everyone at Dalton, every person at his parents' parties, and he'd have been willing to bet that almost every person he'd ever known did some version of that. Perhaps not Kurt's family, at least not based on the weekend he'd spent there in October, but most people and certainly everyone within particular echelons of society. It was more than commonplace; it was essential. Crossing that line was a violation of everything that the civilized society held dear, as his mother could attest to - or could have if she weren't practically a robot programmed by her husband and his slew of psychosuppressant medications.   
  
But it ran deeper for his father. That much had been clear from an early age. Unlike some of his cousins who were allowed to know their heritage within the protective confines of their house only - could speak the language, even, a jumble of words that sounded to Blaine like poorly-pronounced nonsense-Spanish - there was no such freedom in the Anderson home.   
  
If that even was his last name. He had no idea what it should have been, though he was reasonably certain Anderson had come from somewhere else - his father selecting it in the phone book to conceal his origins. It, like everything else, went unasked.  
  
His father didn't just hide things in public the way everyone else did; he hid them in private, too. If Blaine had to hazard a guess, he would say his father tried to hide them even from himself.  
  
And that  _hurt_. Blaine knew that much firsthand. Trying to hide things from yourself, the amount of effort all of that took, the amount of energy that had to be poured daily into loathing an unchangeable part of one's self - to say nothing of the amount of energy it took to pretend  _not_  to hate that part because it was so deeply hidden that as far as the rest of the world was concerned it didn't even exist...That kind of effort wasn't casual. It required hating that part so deeply, so fervently, finding it so fundamentally repulsive and wanting  _so_  badly to get rid of it...  
  
That was how badly his father had to hate himself, had to believe he wasn't a good enough society man and  _person_  because of where his family had come from.  
  
For the first time in his life, he felt an honest kinship with the man. A fleeting moment of warmth from the person who had been nothing but a cold, detached presence at the end of the dinner table, someone who made icy knots form in his stomach whenever he spoke. For a second, Blaine felt almost as if he understood and as if maybe - just maybe - his father honestly believed he had Blaine's best interest at heart.  
  
"No," he replied quietly, meeting Kurt's eyes. "We're not."  
  
If Kurt was confused by the change in pronouns, he didn't let it show on his face. "Then why can't you accept that maybe people are wrong about this, too? Honestly. If you were to ask the people in my town the two things I just asked you, they'd have a completely different answer. Why does the fact that they think we're wrong matter to you?"   
  
The warmth quickly turned hot, rage and frustration bubbling up from somewhere within him as he thought of every dinner he had ever sat through and listened to his father talk about his day and about fixing people like him while he sat  _petrified_  at the center of the table and felt like there was far more than 6 feet between him and each of his parents - felt like there was an entire  _universe_ between them and no way to bridge it except by trying harder and harder to stop being  _this_ , to stop feeling this way. Thinking about every single agonizing day when he couldn't push down the thoughts, the feelings, the  _desire_  far enough. He absently rubbed the heel of his hand over his chest, above the place above his left nipple where the phantom jab of his Warbler pin still lingered. For the first time, thinking about what it  _meant_  hurt more than thinking about the event or about the physical pain subsiding.  
  
There was silence and he wasn't sure if he was supposed to answer Kurt or not. He had no idea how to even begin to answer, because the problem was that he still thought it mattered. It did - it mattered that the entire world would hate him and shun him. It mattered that the second he started to feel these things he had ended his ability to be ordinary or normal or well because it was still an illness in medical books if not in Kurt's mind. It mattered what people thought of you, it always did. It always would. At school, or in college, or when he got out of college and went into whatever it was he was forced into, people needed to have respect for him if he wanted to make it anywhere. And this was not something anyone could ever change their minds enough to respect.   
  
Him thinking that maybe Kurt might be right that theoretically it might not be wrong was one thing; everyone else knowing it was another matter entirely and would never, ever happen.  
  
"Can I ask you something?" Kurt asked quietly, lowering his knees and leaning a little more toward Blaine. "And answer honestly."  
  
"We've always been honest," Blaine replied softly, because it was true - with Kurt, unlike anyone else in his life, he had chosen honesty. He could have lied in the car. He could have lied any other time Kurt asked him. He deflected, which wasn't  _right_  maybe but wasn't dishonest.   
  
Kurt gave a bit of a wry smile - he appreciated the slight intellectual dishonesty it required to agree they'd been honest with one another, but he didn't eschew it or correct Blaine's statement. "When you feel these things for me...do they feel wrong?"  
  
Ten minutes ago, Blaine would have said that of course they did. They hurt. They made him want to hurl himself off the nearest tall building - a building much taller than any on campus would have to do - or take a handful of the strongest psychiatric tranquilizers he could find or marry the next girl he saw to try and make everything easier. Simpler. These feelings for Kurt had him in absolute agony and he wanted nothing more than for them to stop.  
  
But now he wasn't so sure. Nothing felt certain anymore.   
  
"I don't know," he murmured, hand quivering as he leaned his cheek against it.  
  
Kurt nodded and seemed to accept that answer before asking his followup. "If they do...is it because the actually feel wrong, or because other people tell you they're supposed to feel wrong?" Blaine opened his mouth and had no idea what to say, so Kurt continued. "Does it feel unnatural  _for you_? Or do other people just have ideas of what you're supposed to be?"  
  
How was he supposed to know what felt natural or unnatural for himself? It seemed like an absurd question. Who knew anything that was foreign to himself?  
  
But he did know, he realized. He knew because Jean - as lovely as she was, as funny and attractive as she was - never felt like this. Or rather, he never felt like this about her. He felt affection for her, to be sure, and he enjoyed being around her, but the blooming, undeniable attraction he felt every time he saw Kurt so much as look at him - let alone talk to him, let alone seek him out to spend time together...that deep magnetism buried beneath the hatred of what it all meant, the thing that made him keep trying to talk to Kurt even when he didn't honestly believe anything could help him, the thing that dragged him out of bed and across campus after curfew and in the rain...that he only felt for Kurt. Somehow he knew he could  _only_  feel it for Kurt. And even lesser versions of it, the paler but nonetheless alarming sensations he'd had for other boys in his youth and his first years at Dalton...he could never feel it for Jean. Or for Rachel or Laura or any of the other girls he'd ever known.  
  
If it wasn't his natural proclivity to be unnatural, would it have been so hard to change it?  
  
He shifted forward into a kneeling position, wet jeans awkward against the slick floor, and reached out to touch Kurt's face. The way Kurt's eyes fluttered shut and he drew in a soft gasp but looked so achingly sad, as if he was expecting Blaine to touch him and then dash out the door again...he couldn't anymore. He just-...he couldn't keep doing what he'd been doing. None of it.  
  
Maybe Kurt really was right. He wanted to believe he was, at least. He wanted to believe in it so much, to think maybe there was still something out there that wouldn't hurt as much as the past few years. And for right now...  
  
He leaned in and kissed Kurt's lips softly, wanting to draw the boy into his arms and just hold him close, feel his warm, feel  _him_  like some sort of reassuring presence. Kurt gave a surprised little moan, his hands settling awkwardly on Blaine's shoulder. After a few moments Blaine pulled back, and the look of resignation of Kurt's face almost killed him. "I'm sorry," he murmured. Kurt drew in a sharp breath, rolling his eyes as they clouded with tears and shaking his head angrily at the certain abandonment, but Blaine settled beside him on the floor, resting his head on Kurt's shoulder.  
  
"Wh-...What are you doing?" Kurt asked quietly, his voice quivering.  
  
Blaine lifted his head. "I'm sorry, should I-"  
  
"Nono. This is...it's fine, Blaine, I just didn't think you'd-"  
  
 _stay_  was the word they both filled in silently as Blaine laid his head back on Kurt's shoulder.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt didn't remember the last time he'd felt so exhausted. Even after his mom had died and nightmares had plagued him leading to nights of sleeplessness, he didn't remember being quite this tired - beyond tired, really. Drained of all energy. Like if he closed his eyes he might just nosedive into his physics book in a most undignified way in the Dining Hall.   
  
He couldn't have that, so he forced his eyes to stay open and kept his posture ramrod straight so it would be harder to surrender to the temptation to slump over and drift off against his hand, elbow propped on the table, like he'd seen several of his fellow students do. He had far more grace and discipline than they did.  
  
Blaine had finally left around 6, and while Kurt knew that 5 hours of sleep was hardly his record low it wasn't nearly enough for his purposes. His skin felt tight and dry despite using the extra-strength moisturizing regimen this morning - the kind usually reserved for high-stress times such as finals, holiday meal-planning, and the lead-up to the Oscars - and no amount of deliberate loosening could make his tie lay correctly. He wouldn't trade any of that for the hour and change spent on the floor of the bathroom with Blaine close to him; the boy hadn't smelled like he usually did, more musty and stale than the usual fresh cleanness of his generic-brand soap and spicy aftershave, and his pajamas would never recover from the water stains he feared, but Blaine hadn't fled out the door after kissing him the way Kurt had expected.  
  
He just had no idea what any of this meant.   
  
He didn't want to get his hopes up. One kiss and a great hour sitting together saying absolutely nothing were just an hour and a kiss, it didn't mean anything at all. He'd been through this several times already, he didn't want to start it all over again. Not as much as it had hurt last time. But something felt different now, and maybe Blaine really had absorbed any of what he'd been trying to convey last night. This morning. Whatever they were calling it. He seemed like he had, like he was at least open to the idea, but Kurt honestly didn't know. He ran so hot and cold that there was no way to tell.  
  
Which was why he was supposed to be done. To walk away and be over it all. Only he couldn't, not really, not when Blaine showed up with soaked ringlets of hair stuck to his forehead and looking like he was going to die without Kurt's help. Not when he touched him and leaned his head on his shoulder for an hour just to be close.  
  
"Hey, Kurt."  
  
Blaine's voice startled him, and he jumped before he looked up. Blaine chuckled softly, and Kurt couldn't help but note with envy that the Warbler who was the cause of his exhaustion managed to look as presentable as ever. It wasn't fair, really - he should look even more tired. He looked perfectly put-together, charming as ever, with the same confident smile he used to disarm everyone but that Kurt knew by now didn't actually mean anything.  
  
His heart leapt at the same moment his stomach sank, because that meant he'd done it again - he'd let himself think for a couple minutes that maybe things were different when they weren't (but that smile...that  _boy_...) Blaine was back to pretending just as much as ever, which meant the fact that he was even seen speaking to Kurt was novel enough.  
  
"I wanted to thank you - for this morning." Blaine's voice was even, almost enthusiastic but not overly so. It sounded genuine even through its generally put-on confidence.  
  
He needed to stop trying to analyze Blaine's tone so much. This was how he'd gotten into trouble in the first place, reading into things where he shouldn't have. "I would say 'any time', but I do occasionally need my beauty sleep."  
  
Blaine seemed to want to say something but stopped himself, then glanced around and asked quietly, "Do you want to maybe do...something on Friday night?"  
  
No, Kurt told himself firmly. Blaine didn't mean it like that. He did not mean did Kurt want to join him on a night that every other Dalton student who could find a girl to take out went on dates in town. He did not mean that. He meant...something else. He meant did Kurt want to work on arrangements with him in full view of students who might pass by. Or he meant did Kurt want to grab Sam and help him finally get out of the dorms because even now with fewer hours of obsessive studying nightly thanks to improved systems to make his work time more efficient and effective Sam still didn't really go out - he was getting obsessed instead with catching up on comics and starting some project involving rockets that Kurt didn't understand.  
  
He didn't mean any of the things Kurt's derranged little fantasy-loving mind was coming up with. None of them. Not a single one. He needed to just keep reminding himself of that every few seconds so he wouldn't let himself slip and envision dinner in town and a movie-  
  
"Sure," Kurt said slowly, trying not to let his voice sound as breathless at he felt. He knew the fantasies weren't real, but there was something intoxicating about them anyway, about the possibilities they contained. "What did you have in mind?" he added. The quicker he brought himself back to reality, the better.   
  
"I..." Blaine looked around a moment to see who else might be nearby. "I'm not sure. I'm not really good at this kind of thing, Kurt, I never know where to start. Usually the guys pick something for the group, or there are rules, but we can't... _do_  most of that, so I don't know if..."  
  
"Would you like me to plan something?" Kurt asked, adding quietly and hoping his voice didn't go too high on the end, "for our...date?"  
  
Blaine's smile was shy, almost terrified, but it was there and it was  _genuine_ , unlike the rest of the overly-confident smiles he pasted on for everyone else. "But not like...you understand what we can't do, right?"  
  
The list was long and involved anything where anyone might see them or knew who they were, but Kurt didn't care. It took everything in him not to clasp his hands together and grin like an imbecile and practically squeal with delight. His actual response was far more reserved as he smiled and in a breathless voice replied, "Of course. Don't worry - I'll take care of everything."  
  
Blaine nodded, and he looked almost stunned by his actions, as though he couldn't believe he had done that but in the best possible way. "Okay. Then I'll...see you then. Or - at Warbler practice today? 3:00?"  
  
"Yes," Kurt replied, his mind already racing a million miles a minute, envisioning every possible dinner and activity and apartment they could have together. "I'll see you then."


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic was written a few years ago and is being copied to AO3 from another site. We are aware of the dead link problem and will try to fix it within a couple of weeks.

As they drove down the dark backroad out of Westerville, Kurt wasn't sure whether to be more amazed that Blaine hadn't backed out of the evening yet, or how emphatically Blaine had insisted on being the one to drive. Who knew he had such a thing about being in control? Did he think Kurt was going to take him to the now-closed homosexual bar in Columbus and hold him hostage there? Drive him out to the country and drop him in a field with no way to get home?   
  
He did have to admit that Blaine's car was a little nicer than his own, but not by much. He didn't drive his father's pickup truck or anything.  
  
It did make it easier to read the directions, though; it was difficult enough to try to make out the words in the dim pools of light coming from occasional porch lights when he was reading his own handwriting. Blaine probably wouldn't have been able to discern any of it.  
  
"Make a left up here," he instructed, pointing to the stop sign ahead.  
  
"You're sure?" Blaine asked skeptically.  
  
Kurt peered again at the paper. That did say left, right? Had he skipped a line? He didn't think so. "Yes," he stated with more confidence than he really felt.   
  
"Where are we going?"  
  
It was roughly the hundredth time Blaine had asked that question since they'd gotten into the car. Kurt wasn't dumb enough to tell him, not when Blaine was the one in the driver's seat and had the power to swiftly end this...outing.  
  
He kept trying not to refer to it as a date, even in his mind. If he did that, he would start getting his hopes up or set Blaine's panic instinct off again, and those were the last things he wanted. Even though Blaine hadn't bolted when he'd called it a date earlier in the week, everything still felt so tenuous, as if the entire house of cards would collapse at any moment. If he could at least keep his expectations low, that might help avoid the feeling that his entire future had been crushed when Blaine fled again.  
  
He wanted it to work. He wanted so badly to have all the things he'd been wanting for months now, and certainly since January. But once bitten, twice shy, was a better way to go...even as much as the vivid images of a sweet courtship kept playing unwillingly in his mind.  
  
"It's a surprise," he stated for the hundredth time, noting that Blaine did not seem in the least reassured by that answer. If anything he appeared more on-edge.  
  
"This isn't somewhere people can-"  
  
"Blaine," Kurt cut him off. "Do you trust me?"  
  
Blaine glanced over at him, and while Kurt couldn't see his face all that well in the dim light, Blaine's voice was sincere. Soft. A little more relaxed than Kurt had heard all evening as he stated with wholehearted confirmation, "Yes."  
  
"Then let it be a surprise," Kurt replied. Blaine sighed, but he nodded and continued dutifully down the road. "I think we take a right over there."  
  
"Where on earth did you get these directions?"  
  
"It's a place Sam's been before," he stated.  
  
"You're getting directions from a guy who barely knows his right from his left?" Blaine asked in dismay.  
  
"He does," Kurt protested. "Finn might not, but Sam does. Even if he's not the best dancer in the world...and does sometimes start on the wrong foot during step-touches...but he's a lot smarter than people realize." Kinder, too; Kurt wasn't sure if people knew that about Sam. He had a kind of gentle, quiet sweetness to him and was so genuine. Maybe Sam would understand if he knew about...all of this, Kurt thought.   
  
Blaine would kill him, he knew. Blaine, who was terrified of anyone knowing anything ever, would not take well to someone else at school knowing - certainly not a fellow Warbler. Not as close-knit as most of their group was and how quickly rumours spread.   
  
"You're right," Blaine confirmed, nodding. "You really lucked out with him as a roommate. The boy I was stuck with my first year was obnoxious...and always around." He hesitated, then asked, "Has he asked about the other night?"  
  
Kurt shook his head. "He asked if you were okay and I told him you were. Nothing further."  
  
Blaine seemed to relax a miniscule amount. "Okay. And no one knows about..." He gestured awkwardly with his thumbs in the direction of the road, his hands still wrapped around the steering wheel.  
  
"No," Kurt replied quietly. "No one knows." Blaine nodded again and seemed to relax a little bit more, and Kurt found himself wondering if this was just because their...whatever-it-was was new, or if Blaine would always be like this. Would he always be trying to hide himself, to hide  _them_? Or was this merely the next step in getting Blaine comfortable with the idea?   
  
_It's still new,_  Kurt reminded himself.  _He just figured out he's not morally reprehensible a few days ago. He didn't back out. Give him time._  
  
Time felt excrutiating, but he knew that time was less painful than Blaine running away again. So time would have to do.  
  
In the distance, overhead lamps illuminated the gravel parking lot in front of a large movie screen. Blaine's hands gripped the wheel more tightly as he saw the twenty or so cars already parked there, the concessions stand, the attendant standing at the front of the driveway to collect money from the passengers of each vehicle. "Kurt-"  
  
Kurt tried to ignore the panic in Blaine's voice as he calmly instructed, "Turn in here."  
  
"A drive-in? The place that what we're doing is the most obvious? Only people on dates go to drive-ins, Kurt, friends who go to movies go somewhere that it doesn't look like they're just trying to neck in the backseat!"  
  
Kurt wished things were simple enough that he could reply with a comment about the fact that he knew for a fact that Blaine wanted to do more than just neck him, but things weren't that uncomplicated. They were tense, terse, an agonizingly complex dance of each of them admitting just enough about wanting just a fraction of their real desires.   
  
_It's still new. Give him time._  
  
"Have you ever been to a drive-in and paid a single bit of attention to any other car in the lot?" he asked skeptically. "God knows Finn and Quinn never did. Besides, you can't even see inside the cars, that's the point."  
  
"How would you know?"  
  
"Because I was busy trying to watch other people so I wouldn't have to watch my stepbrother making out with his girlfriend in the rearview mirror," Kurt replied dryly with a raise of his eyebrow. Those had been the worst Saturdays ever. He and Finn were close enough, they got along well enough he supposed, all things considered. But he had learned far more than he had ever wanted to know about what his stepbrother sounded like when he made out, or where on Quinn's neck she liked to be kissed, or about Finn's..."problem" when making out. Plus Finn had a tendency to almost kick out the back window with his long, uncoordinated legs. The movies were always terrible, and there were only so many weekends in a row he could stand to watch X the Unknown.  
  
(The fact that that film had been a "consolation prize" on Finn's part because it was technically a foreign-made film was even more sad than the attempt at a plot..a plot that did not improve with repeated viewings.)  
  
He half expected Blaine to make a U-turn in the middle of the road and attempt to get them back to school as quickly as possible. Instead, he saw Blaine draw in a deep breath and sit up a little straighter in his seat, turning into the driveway. He rolled down his window for the attendant - a small, ancient man who moved slowly to the car with his hand out. Blaine put on his most confident smile and wished the man good evening as he paid, as though he were trying to project such an air of nonchalance that the man might not wonder why two boys were seeing a drive-in movie by themselves.  
  
Kurt doubted the man would seriously wonder that. For one thing, it was dark and the man didn't look like he had that sharp of eyesight. For another, friends went to movies all the time together. Their presence wasn't inherently suspicious, no matter what Blaine seemed to think.   
  
Besides, he had a feeling about this. Ever since talking to Leroy at dinner and hearing about the idea of gathering in places where other homosexuals might be, he had been attempting to figure out how one found such a place - particularly in Ohio where it was hard to find  _anything_  outside the mainstream, ranging from a suitably luxurious Dior grey sweater that would fit his non-feminine frame, to a lighter-weight frock coat, to copies of French Vogue. But between the remote location, the film in question, the strange wording of the advertisement, the fact that the cars were all parked as far away from each other as they could get while still seeing the screen...something told him they might not be the only ones there tonight.  
  
Blaine rolled up his window and pulled into a space near the back and far from prying eyes of other cars; Kurt considered protesting, but decided that if Blaine would feel more relaxed by the location then it would be worth the less-than-perfect view of the screen. Blaine tuned his radio to the frequency indicated on a nearby sign, and the sound of bubbly pre-show music filled the car. "So," he said slowly, turning to face Kurt. "Now what?"  
  
"Now...we enjoy our evening out," Kurt replied simply.  
  
"Yeah. I mean- yes, of course." Blaine seemed flustered; it was an unusual look on him and not an especially good one. "I'm sorry, I'm not very good at this."  
  
"Don't worry about it," Kurt assured him gently. "I was honestly surprised when you even suggested it, the fact that we're here is enough for me."  
  
It sounded desperate, he realized as he said it, and that almost made him cringe. It was true, of course, but something about it made him feel as though he was settling for any scrap of attention, any tidbit of time with Blaine as an alternative to something real and deep and fulfilling. The rest would come, he assured himself.  
  
He wasn't sure when he started expecting everything from people; for so many years he had expected absolutely nothing. He had expected that Finn and his friends would be obnoxious to him, that the girls who spoke with him would shove him away as soon as a boy they wanted to like them was nearby, that everyone outside his family (well, his family and the Joneses, which were one in the same as far as he was concerned) would find him irritating at best, insignificant at worst. But since meeting Blaine - or maybe just since starting at Dalton, he wasn't sure since they did coincide so closely - he had started feeling like he was going to have everything in the world. Not just like one day he would escape his cesspit of a cowtown and move somewhere that would appreciate his talent and creativity instead of finding him obnoxiously eccentric; he had believed that for years. In the past few months, though, it had started feeling like not only was it going to happen, but like he deserved it. Like he was entitled to it and would get it and things would be good for him. Like people would be good.  
  
It was terrifying - feeling that way and knowing how much it had hurt when Blaine had left. Knowing that Blaine could still easily just walk out the door and never speak to him again because he was so scared of all this. But no matter how hard he tried to wall himself off, how much he attempted to ratchet down expectations as he'd done for over a decade now so he could avoid disappointment, he found the fantasies still creeping up on him. He seized on every moment of perceived action - good or bad - on Blaine's part and tried to figure out what it meant, like reading tea leaves all over the boy's face.  
  
He needed to stop, he knew that. But Blaine hadn't left, so that had to be a good sign right?  
  
"I just wanted to spend time with you," he offered, which was true. "I thought at least this way we wouldn't have to keep looking over our shoulders like I knew you would if we went to a restaurant or were somewhere in town. No one can hear us in here. And look-" He gestured toward the other cars. "Can you even see who's in any of them?"  
  
Blaine peered through the windshield at the other cars, trying as hard as he could to see who might be in there. After all, if he could see them, then that meant they could see him. He could take no chances with this, not as toxic as that reputation would be to both of them. Colleges would refuse to admit people known to be homosexuals, no one in their right mind would hire someone, if anyone saw them...anyone who could confirm later that they had been there together or doing anything - holding hands, let alone kissing, let alone any of the things he wanted to do whenever he was around Kurt...  
  
He saw nothing. A few shadowy figures that looked vaguely like people, and occasionally from a particularly large silhouette of a bouffant it was possible to tell that the person was a woman, but even that was only in two of the cars. In the rest, the passengers either remained a mystery - assuming he could even see the car well enough to make a determination. Most of them were too far away.  
  
"No," he confirmed, relaxing just a little. "No, I can't see any of them."  
  
"For all you know, they could all be homosexuals," Kurt announced proudly, and the unspoken 'like us' in his voice made Blaine swallow hard. He was trying, but Kurt's pride at being different unnerved him more often than not. He adored how strong Kurt was, and he was incredibly envious of it; he wanted desperately to feel as little self-hatred as Kurt had to feel to parade around like he did. At the same time, though, it seemed foolhardy. Dangerous. He still wasn't sure Kurt understood the risks of any of this, the way the real world actually worked when it came to people like them. Three dozen men in a study didn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things, and even if he could concede that maybe -  _maybe_  - people like his father were...not entirely correct when it came to assessment of their health...it didn't mean anything was actually better.  
  
He wanted to be like any other teenager. He wanted to be like everyone else, to use the drive-in for its intended purpose and not worry about people seeing him. He didn't want it to matter because he wanted to be able to say he was there with a girl and not be insulting his actual date - Kurt wasn't a girl and would resent him saying that. He wanted to be able to want to go out with a girl, to blend in and just be normal.   
  
But absent the actual ability to change any of that (and god knew he'd tried), he didn't see the point in fighting it any longer. And Kurt looked so excited in the harsh glow over the overhead parking lot lamps, his face lit up as he grinned and half-bounced in his seat at the mere prospect of being in a place where there could be others like them and no one would ever know. Blaine didn't find it especially likely, but he wasn't going to burst Kurt's bubble. He wasn't going to tell Kurt that anyone else like them was smart enough to stay in where no one could potentially see them.  
  
He liked seeing Kurt's smile too much to do that.  
  
"I'm hungry, do you want to grab some food before it starts?" he offered.   
  
"Sure." Kurt looked like it would be physically impossible for him to stop smiling.   
  
Blaine had spent more time than he cared to think about watching Kurt - in Warbler meetings, in the dining hall, reading magazines and listening to music on his bed. But for some reason it had never occurred to him just how gracefully Kurt carried himself, how much strength and poise he had. In a dimly-lit parking lot, where they had no idea who else might be there, as he tried to keep himself consciously in-check to ensure that he didn't do something stupid like smile too brightly in Kurt's direction, Kurt didn't change. Blaine adjusted his gait slightly, held his gestures closer in to his body, glanced around but tried to look like he wasn't, all of it feeling unnatural and forced, but Kurt...Kurt walked tall across the gravel toward the glow of the concessions stand, head held high, as though he honestly couldn't be bothered by what anyone else might think when they saw him. When they saw  _them_.  
  
Blaine honestly couldn't imagine ever being that way. He couldn't imagine not caring if people guessed what he was. He couldn't imagine not caring whether he blended in or not - with the exception of the few minutes he was on-stage. The rest of the time...  
  
He wondered what it would be like to be that way, to live like Kurt did - without fear. Without self-consciousness. Without the paranoia that plagued him the second he was in a room with Kurt and any other people. How amazing must that be, not a single voice of doubt whispering in his ear that everyone must know by now how sick he was and the only way to fix it was to be as normal as humanly possible. Not the echoes of his father speaking in even tones about the importance of blending in so people would respect him.  
  
Kurt strutted through the world like he knew for certain he deserved that kind of respect, and anyone who didn't give it willingly did so at their peril.  
  
Kurt took his place in line, hand coming to rest on his hip as he waited with a bored expression that softened into a grin as Blaine took his place beside him. They didn't touch, but it still felt alarmingly intimate as Blaine wondered if anyone else would notice the look that passed between them. No one appeared to, everyone too involved with their own groups of friends to notice. He didn't see any of the usual teenage couples, which was strange - no boys and girls waiting with one another and trying to keep from pawing each other outside their cars. But then, when was the last time he'd been to one of these places? Blaine asked himself. Mostly he just heard tell from the other guys - when a group of them would go out, they almost always went to the indoor theater in town. If half of Jeff and Nick's stories were to be believed, the couples that were really getting into things didn't even bother leaving their cars long enough to get snacks.  
  
They each ordered their provisions, paying separately, and carried them back toward the car. "I just don't understand why they can't have food options that aren't soaked in grease," Kurt stated, eyeing Blaine's burger and fries suspiciously then casting a forlorn look at his own tray which held only a pop and small bag of popcorn.   
  
"It's fast food, silly," Blaine teased.  
  
"Yes, but plenty of things can be made quickly without being disgusting. I mean, how long does it take to make a side salad? Really."  
  
There was a quiet "Mmhmm" of agreement from behind them, and Blaine froze. Kurt turned quickly to the source of the sound and saw two men carrying their own trays toward a car a few rows ahead of Blaine's. Probably in their late 20s, dressed in cuffed jeans with loafers and plaid shirts that showed off their biceps.  
  
None of the four said anything, but there was a strange dance that went on - a series of expressions. Blaine watched, terrified, as one man glanced at the other, quirked an eyebrow and smiled, then glanced at Kurt. Kurt flushed and cast a sideways look at Blaine with an excited grin. The second man gave them both a knowing look and nodded to them as he led the first man toward their car. The entire exchange took less than a few moments but left Blaine feeling like a pile of quivering nerves and left Kurt practically bouncing out of his expensive shoes.   
  
"I told you," he hissed excitedly as he and Blaine made their way to the car. "Didn't I?"  
  
No one had needed to say anything - it was obvious what they all were, and that they all knew what they all were. And that felt incredible.  
  
As Kurt got into the car, he found himself staring out the front windshield, watching every person and group as they made their way back and forth between cars and concessions and the restroom. There were by far more men than women, often in pairs but not always; one had an entire group that looked indistinguishable from any group of Dalton boys but felt  _different_  somehow. He wondered if maybe this was the kind of place Leroy had meant, if maybe he really had found it.  
  
He wondered mostly if it would still be like this next week when the movie was different. He hoped so - the idea sent a shiver of excitement through him. They could have a usual place:  _their_  place, like any other couple. They could come here every Friday and watch movies and not have to be so afraid. Maybe in time they could even talk to some of the other people. He doubted that only because no one seemed to really speak to anyone except whomever they had come with, but maybe he was just missing it.   
  
The possibilities seemed endless.  
  
The lights dimmed, and they ate silently through the pre-show cartoons, both more fascinated by the prospect of people-watching than by the animated characters performing slapstick comedy. Blaine spoke first.  
  
"Do you think they're really..."  
  
"Yes," Kurt replied with absolute conviction.   
  
"But they seemed so..."  _normal_. They dressed like Rock Hudson and half the boys in that group over there looked like they could be Warblers. Not one shuffled through the parking lot like the patients in the asylum, but they didn't rampantly attack one another either as he'd been led to believe happened in unmedicated cases. None of them appeared in the least bit sick. Many of them looked happy, even - not as happy as Kurt, who was still practically vibrating with excitement...he doubted anyone else could be  _that_ happy...but happy  _enough_. "What do you think happens to them when they leave here?" he asked quietly, unable to imagine them moving freely anywhere else in the world. After all, he would have seen them. He would have seen them and known not to be quite so afraid. Other people would see them, and would either embrace them or arrest them and he'd never heard of either one, so clearly that meant they had to all go somewhere, right?  
  
"The same thing that happens to you, I suppose," Kurt replied thoughtfully after a moment. Blaine started to protest that whatever happened to one of them happened to both, but Kurt was right; Blaine went back to appearing as normal as possible, to blending in, and Kurt kept walking down the hall with his head held high and a strut in his step no matter what people might say about him.  
  
He wondered who else was like him that he'd never known or noticed before. Kurt had been easy to pick out, despite his feelings at one point that Kurt must not be sick because he was far too happy and could actually speak to his father. But if everyone else was more like he was, and if no one knew about  _him_ , then what did that mean for...  
  
"Y- You said Sam told you about this place?"  
  
"Yeah, why?" Kurt asked, then he started laughing as he realized what Blaine was asking. "Sam's not a homosexual, Blaine, don't be ridiculous. They play bad science fiction movies out here on Sundays and he comes here for a little escape when things get bad. I found out about this movie from an ad, he just told me how to get here."  
  
"So which movie is it?" he asked as the cartoon ended.  
  
Kurt gave a little sly smile as he said, "You'll see."  
  
The [main title](http://youtu.be/vgPoBkUj51U) music was familiar as the MGM lion roared proudly on the studio card. Blaine's eyes widened and he turned to stare at Kurt. "You-...this is where you-"  
  
"You told me it was your favourite," he stated, then studied Blaine's face in the flickering light from the screen. "It's okay, right?" he checked, because Blaine didn't seem happy. He seemed surprised more than anything, which Kurt supposed was a good thing but wasn't exactly the response he'd been going for.   
  
"Yes," Blaine replied quietly, a beaming, genuine smile spreading slowly across his face. "Yes, Kurt, it's more than okay. I just had no idea anywhere around here even played it regularly. There were a couple places last summer for the twentieth anniversary, but I thought I'd have to wait another five years for theaters to start playing it again."  
  
"Well then, Blaine Anderson, today is your lucky day," Kurt smiled, swishing a little in his seat as he got more comfortable. He watched Blaine, still sitting upright with impeccable posture, watch the film with a type of rapt fascination usually reserved for children watching the film for the first time. There was an innocence to him like this, a genuine openness that Kurt had only ever seen before when Blaine sang...only this was less theatrical. It was quiet and almost exposed, and he wasn't sure if it was the way the screen backlit Blaine's - his  _boyfriend's_  - features so that Kurt could practically see every distinct eyelash, or the way Blaine silently mouthed along with the words of the first scene, but the entire moment felt so delicate and beautiful that Kurt couldn't bring himself to look away to watch the movie itself.  
  
What he was looking at was far more interesting than gingham dresses and dogs in picnic baskets.   
  
"I don't care what anyone says," Blaine said quietly, his eyes still straight ahead on the screen as he watched Dorothy watch the clouds part while Toto sat with his paw just barely up, clearly at the command of his off-screen trainer. "No one else can sing this like she can." He hesitated a moment, then turned to glance at Kurt and admitted softly, "But you come darn close." As Kurt blushed, Blaine added in a bashful whisper, "I couldn't take my eyes off you. I tried to chalk it up to loving the song, but I think that was always a lie. It was  _you_."  
  
Kurt's eyes widened at Blaine's admission. He hadn't noticed - he'd been so focused on trying to nail the audition, to get into the group so he could spend more time around Blaine that he hadn't even seen that particular clue? Not that he had known what it meant then anyway, he reminded himself. He hadn't figured that part out until Blaine and then Rachel told him at the bar in October. But a part of him did wonder how much things would have been different if he'd noticed then. Would he have known enough to start pursuing Blaine earlier? Or would he have been so perplexed that it would have been nothing more than a deeper-than-deep friendship?   
  
Or would he have let Blaine's fear halt them both? Probably the last option, if the previous few weeks were any indication. Had he not known all he knew, he would have let Blaine run away, and then where would they be?  
  
He didn't know how to say that, though, so he settled for something simpler. Safer, though potentially personally embarrassing.  
  
"I used to pretend to be Miss Gulch," he stated.  
  
Blaine stared at him, looking skeptically amused. "Really?"  
  
Kurt nodded. "When I was little, I would ride my bike up and down the sidewalk and hum the song like that. My dad thought I had lost my mind." He smiled at the memory. The mental image that produced made Blaine smile as he thought of little tiny Kurt pedaling up and down the block, reenacting one of the classic movie villains, not even caring that the other kids must have thought he was ridiculous.   
  
So Kurt had always been fearless; did that mean it was too late for him?  
  
He drew in a deep breath and reached over to take Kurt's hand.   
  
They watched the next few scenes in near-silence as Blaine tried not to think about how much the conman reminded him of his father - as Professor Marvel or as the Wizard, either one - and they laughed at the happy men in the rowboat in the twister ("Where exactly is there a lake in Kansas the right size for that boat? Did you see the shots of the farm? No water in sight.") and wondered why precisely no one could hear her trying to get into the storm cellar. As the house landed, he could practically feel Kurt radiating with excited energy. "What is it?"  
  
"This is my favourite part," he explained. "The big reveal. My mom saw it when it came out and she told me that when Dorothy opens the door and reveals Oz, there was an audible gasp in the room at how sudden and beautiful and  _bright_  it all was. She had seen colour movies before, but never like that." He paused, then added, "Maybe because it was coming from black and white which seemed dull - not even austere, just dim compared to the vibrant flowers." He had always thought he'd understood that moment, he had always enjoyed it as a child, but now it felt like he  _truly_  understood. That magical moment when everything that had seemed perfectly fine just opened up into this amazing, startlingly vibrant world full of wonder and new things to explore and a sense of belonging and purpose... "Like you," he added quietly.  
  
Blaine turned to stare at him, a little confused. "What do you mean?"  
  
Gathering his nerve and feeling a little silly anyway, Kurt explained, "The moment I realized I liked you was like that. Like all of a sudden there was nothing in the world but you singing, and everything else was black and white and we were in colour."  
  
"When was this?" he asked, looking as though he was trying to think back to every time Kurt had ever seen him sing and coming to the conclusion there were far too many times.  
  
"Garland at the Grove," Kurt stated. He quietly sang the lyrics of the chorus, of the moment he'd realized exactly what all of this was and put a name to it. "Your eyes made skies seem blue again, what else can I do again, but keep repeating-"  
  
"Through and through..." Blaine filled in the next lyric.  
  
The one after that - "I love you, love you" - hung heavily between them as they stared at each other, the sounds of their breathing echoing through the small car, eyes locked on one another, neither one feeling quite ready to admit that. Not now, not when everything was still so tenuous, so new, so  _fragile_. Still, they understood.  
  
Kurt leaned in first, kissing Blaine deeply as he felt Blaine's palm slowly curl against his cheek. Kurt had half-expected Blaine to pull away as he had during every other time he'd made the first move, but instead he slid closer - as close as he could get with the gear shift between them and the awkward division between the seats. Kurt wished they'd brought his car, with its backseat that had a lot more room, but he supposed maybe it was better to take things slow for right now anyway.  
  
After all, if taking things cautiously meant Blaine didn't skitter away every time Kurt moved toward him, it was more than worth it.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"[You know](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEUTE0K3B3o)," Kurt said quietly, his head leaning against Blaine's shoulder, "I understand that they wanted to make things easier to film in a short time period, and that hosing down a single white horse to remove the Jello powder and repaint them between each take would be time-consuming..."  
  
"But they could have at least picked horses that looked the same?" Blaine replied with a smile, his arm draped casually around Kurt's shoulders. "That bothered me so much when I saw it last year. I don't know why I hadn't noticed it before that."  
  
"You were more enamored of the Emerald City," Kurt suggested. "I know I was. A place where you could go and be pampered, fixed up, live luxuriously...they can even dye her eyes to match her gown."  
  
"Don't do that - I like your eyes," Blaine stated before realizing quite what he'd said.  
  
Kurt blushed and smiled. "I like your eyes too," he replied, demurring a little. Recovering, he added, "I wanted to live there as a child."  
  
"I can't say I blame you," Blaine replied. In truth, he had too - even though green wasn't his favourite colour, there was an element of everyone blending-in there even though if you looked at them individually or as their small groups they looked a little freakish. From the men with their bulging biceps and semi-short limbs stuffing Scarecrow, to the women who looked like nuns in sequined habits - even the man with the big red beard and comic mustache wearing lime green riding pants and a tall green top hat didn't stand out there.   
  
He knew from the books, of course, that it wasn't real. Everyone looked exactly the same in the Emerald City as they did outside it, it was just that within the borders everyone wore green-tinted glasses that made the Emerald City appear emerald; in reality, people who seemed odd were still odd, there was no magical blending-in ability that made even the most ridiculous characters seem commonplace like there was in the film version. But he had always preferred the movie version anyway.  
  
When he had first transferred to Dalton, he had thought that must be what the Emerald City felt like - grand, imposing, with a cast of characters who seemed outlandish at first but blended one into the next into the next...until he realized that everyone simply knew how to put on masks to go with their uniforms, just as he did. He and Kurt weren't much better off there, it was just red-and-blue striped glasses.  
  
Maybe out here could be different. He had no idea.  
  
"He shouldn't have gotten that hair," Kurt stated, nodding to the Cowardly Lion. "The curls work for him but not when the fur on his shoulders is all so long and straight."  
  
Blaine did his best not to self-consciously reach up and press his own hair into place. He could feel that at least a few curls had shifted out of place when Kurt's hands tangled there while they kissed. Mostly he just watched uncomfortably as the Lion minced and styled his way down the steps with the rest of them. He remembered his father's comments about him the one and only time he remembered watching this movie as a family - his father rarely had time for "that kind of frivolity" and his mother was never interested enough to take him on her own.   
  
He remembered a long and involved conversation his father had with a colleague at the next party Blaine was forced to attend, talking about the ways in which television and film were changing the national psychology. There had always been bad influences, his father reasoned, but now they were so much more readily available than they had been when he had been a child. In the 1920s and early 1930s there had been no outlandish, flamboyant characters for him to go see at the movies - though in hindsight Blaine wondered if that was accurate - but  _now_  just look at the prevalence of sissy characters, swishing and mincing characters committed to celluloid who were met without condemnation or correction. If they were allowed to continue, his father had said, what would that teach young boys struggling with such things? This was why strong masculine role models were essential - absolutely vital - in destroying the Communists.  
  
The friend had nodded and shifted into a conversation about the ill-virtues of assertive women in such films, but all Blaine had been able to think about was how much he had liked the Cowardly Lion. The Cowardly Lion, with his overly-dramatic song who felt everything too deeply, especially fear. Who ran away from every fight. Who was practically terrified of his own shadow.  
  
"Which one would you be?" Kurt asked idly.   
  
Blaine could feel the way Kurt shifted against his shoulder to try to get closer and more comfortable, and it made his voice catch in his throat for a moment before he answered. "The Cowardly Lion."  
  
Kurt lifted his head and glanced at Blaine. "Really." He considered it for a moment, then nodded. "I can see that."  
  
"And you?"  
  
Kurt didn't have to think long - his father had made the comparison on a few occasions when he was younger. "The Tin Man," he stated with conviction.  
  
For as long as he could remember, he had been cold. Distant. He didn't trust people, he certainly didn't trust anyone his own age - except Mercedes of course - and he spent so much time shutting everyone out, so much effort trying to protect his heart and his pride and his dignity from the bullies at school, that it was difficult to let people in. But somehow that had changed now and he wanted to let Blaine in everywhere. He wanted Blaine to hand him a chintzy red heart-shaped pocketwatch. Maybe hearts could never be practical until they could never be broken, but he couldn't bear the thought of being without one now that he had it - like going back to black and white movies now that he knew how vibrant colour could be on that screen.   
  
"For what it's worth," Kurt stated as the Lion began to [sing](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul2r7Cxc6U8), "Unlike the Scarecrow who didn't actually have much of a brain before the Wizard gave him the diploma, or the Tin Man who didn't have a heart until he got the watch...the Lion had courage all along. Just not in a way anyone realized."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"It takes courage to walk around like that," Kurt offered. "To cry, to be that vulnerable..." To not be afraid to show people that he had feelings, that his heart was easily broken, that he was afraid of so much.   
  
"To prance and speak like that," Blaine added, thinking about the way Kurt walked around with his head held high when all Blaine wanted to do was hide...and he wasn't the type of boy who had been labeled a sissy from the age of six the way he was certain Kurt had been. "To not hide everything."  
  
"Being a scaredy-cat requires being pretty brave," Kurt concluded, drawing in a deep breath and looking up at Blaine. Blaine nodded, a note of concern and vulnerability in his eyes as he pulled Kurt just a little closer.   
  
_What makes the hottentot so hot?  
What puts the ape- in apricot?  
Whadathey got that I ain't got?  
  
Courage.  
  
You can say that again!_  
  
Both nodded again, leaving the rest unspoken as they settled in to watch the end of the movie.


	27. Chapter 27

Blaine had a lot of advantages at Dalton. As a Dean's List student, he was permitted to take advantage of study rooms in the library that he made frequent use of while working on group projects. As a Warbler, he could get away with almost anything, especially by virtue of the fact that he was a charming, well-liked Warbler with a smile and an earnest sincerity about him that made teachers and administrators alike believe anything Blaine wanted to tell them was true. His status put him in a position to earn personal recommendations to prestigious institutions up and down the East Coast, and there was no doubt that if any college admissions department were to call Dalton to inquire about him they would hear nothing but wonderful things about him. But of all the things Blaine enjoyed most about status at such a distinguished institution, it was this:  
  
He loved that he was a senior and had his own room.  
  
It was a stupid thing, it felt petty to even purposefully enjoy it. He also knew that whatever school he attended next year would give him at least one roommate, possibly two. He had never particularly minded the concept of a shared room, either, and save the experience his freshman year with his pungent roommate, he'd had generally positive experiences with the system. He and Wes had gotten along well during sophomore year, and when he ended up with a quiet, bookish non-Warbler his junior year he found he enjoyed the silence even if it did mean spending a lot of time in friends' rooms so he wouldn't disturb anyone.   
  
But there was something about having to be constantly  _on_  that got exhausting after awhile. It was a milder form of what he felt so often in his parents' house - the perpetual act of putting on a front so enthusiastically that no one knew it wasn't real. While he much preferred it to the cold, disaffected, distant mask he wore when he left Dalton if only because the act of being so restrained made him feel like he was suffocating, it was no less exhausting to past on a smile and strut confidently through the halls with cheer and warmth even when he wanted to curl in a ball and hide.   
  
Or, as was the case these days, when he wanted to jump up and down and shout from the rooftops how happy he was. How terrified, too, but not-...it was complicated. It wasn't easy to express to himself, certainly not to anyone else even if that might have otherwise been an option (which it wasn't). Maybe if he could find a song, but...in the meantime.   
  
Actually, he wasn't sure such a song  _existed_  for something as complex as what he was feeling. He would have to sing two back-to-back and try to meld them somehow if he really wanted something that would adequately express such conflicting, strong emotions.  
  
He was happy. Sort of. Or-...really happy for a moment or two before realizing how scared he was.  
  
He'd accepted that Kurt might be right, that had been huge. He could acknowledge that maybe - just maybe - assertions of his illness were...medically overstated. He was starting to wonder if maybe what made people like him crazy was spending years and years of trying desperately to change and feeling like a horrible failure; that had certainly made him feel  _crazed_ , if that was any indication.   
  
And maybe there really were men out there who weren't sick in any way other than their desires and proclivities. Maybe his father really was wrong about the degree of threat that his patients posed to the rest of society. Maybe. He still wasn't sure, but he at least could embrace the idea that  _he_  didn't feel like a danger to anyone else. Not as long as Kurt wanted the things that he wanted such that they were both engaged and therefore he wasn't infecting Kurt with some kind of unnatural, undesired urges, at any rate. Not as long as he remembered that hurting that amazing boy was wrong no matter what other desires he had. So maybe he wasn't actually a threat to anyone.  
  
And maybe that meant he really didn't need treatment. Maybe treatment really was like the equivalent of tying a left-handed boy's hand so he would be forced to use his right - he had never really thought of it like that until Kurt said it that night. He remembered people thinking that was normal when he was younger and now it had gone out of favour, so that might be the next step in all of this. He had no idea. But at the very least, he could acknowledge that Kurt might have a point.  
  
But the next step was where he faltered.  
  
Kurt kept saying it didn't matter what people said, but he was wrong. It did matter. Being respected mattered. Being  _respectable_  was important - and not just for him. For him, for his father, for his entire family. For the name. For the institution of Dalton - he could only imagine how much damage would be done to the school's reputation if it was discovered that there were secret homosexuals attending. A couple schools in New York had almost gotten shut down over allowing homosexual college students, he knew.   
  
Or, he thought he knew. It had been a story from his father, and if his father was wrong about everything else, Blaine wasn't sure what he was meant to believe anymore.  
  
He didn't want to be-...he knew how his father's patients got looked at. They were either pitied, or looked at with thinly-veiled disgust, or thrown in jail, and he...he didn't want that. He didn't want to be like that. As obnoxious as his father's obsession with image and perfection was, a part of him thought maybe the man had a point. What was so wrong with wanting people to like him? What was so inherently bad about not wanting to be a pariah? Ultimately it didn't matter if it turned out that Kurt was right and his father and everyone else in the world were wrong about whether he was sick or not - the end result would be the same.  
  
But in his room, with Kurt lying beside him on the bed...it didn't feel like that.  
  
Kurt's lips were soft in a way that made him constantly wonder which of the many facial and skin products kept them that way; he never remembered to ask. It was hard to think of much of anything with the fine stubble of Kurt's cheek under his fingertips. The Exciting Connie Francis was playing on the turntable - Kurt had brought it, along with a few other albums, but Blaine thought it would be more appropriate than Peggy Lee's I Like MEN. Last time, on Tuesday, it had been his Johnny Mathis album, which set a much better mood. Even so, he wasn't really going to complain about listening to [Time After Time](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE7jCtbhMB4) as Kurt scooted forward on his side a few inches and pressed his lips gently against Blaine's.   
  
There were times kissing Kurt felt frantic, desperate, like if he didn't practically devour Kurt's face he might go crazy. Times he sat in rehearsal and stared at Kurt and wanted to whisk him off to his room and slam the door behind them and pull Kurt as close as he could and do everything he still knew he probably shouldn't do. Times he thought maybe he really was going insane because no one should be fixating on someone as much as he fixated on the boy with his pale, luminescent skin and his incredible glasz eyes and the sense of humour no one else seemed to understand the way he did. Times he felt like if he wasn't careful, he would lose himself again and do the kinds of horrible things he'd done before.  
  
This was different.   
  
He'd never given much thought to erotic urges as something  _gentle_  before. That wasn't to say he believed everyone was inherently sexually aggressive; he knew that wasn't true. But lying there with Kurt and wanting to just hold him-...it was new. It felt different and strange and inherently disconcerting, but at the same time so warm and comfortable that he couldn't disavow it - or even dislike it.   
  
"You're quiet," Kurt pointed out with a soft smile.  
  
"You keep me pretty occupied," Blaine replied, and Kurt's smile turned to a smirk that looked so momentarily wicked in the early evening twilight that Blaine had to laugh. "I'm not complaining," he added.  
  
"I should hope not." Kurt's fingertips skimmed across his temple, brushing back the short hair just above his ear before stopping. "Blaine. Why in the world do you do this to yourself?" he asked, and Blaine's mind raced for a moment as he wondered what Kurt could mean. Of course he wondered why he did this to himself, why he let himself feel these things, why he didn't run like any sane person might, but for  _Kurt_  of all people to ask that- "The jingle says a  _dab_  will do ya, not the entire tube!" He flicked at the edge of Blaine's hair in annoyance and with a roll of his eyes. The hair barely moved - a fact that normally Blaine was grateful for. He spent more than his share of time each morning staring at the mirror and hoping and willing and praying his hair to do what he wanted it to do. He had spent what felt like eons trying to find the right hair product to tame his unnaturally naturally curly hair into a nice, slick, sideparted fashion. It went with the uniform, with the personae. The one that went to parties and smiled so broadly that no one believed it was fake, who tried to pretend he didn't have emotions beneath all the pressed wool jackets and perfectly-knotted ties.  
  
Here with Kurt it felt wrong. Too stiff. Too fake.  
  
But he couldn't exactly abandon it. After all, he would have to leave this room eventually, to leave this bed with the soft kisses and Kurt's fingers working frustratedly through his hair and the soulful wailings of female singers in the background. And when they left this room, he couldn't be this boy anymore; he would have to be that other guy. The one that at least passably survived in his father's house, the one who would get every accolade from Dalton faculty to secure a slot in a top university, the one who never complained and always smiled and felt like the future held nothing but death. Cold, robotic, rote interaction and death.  
  
What was he supposed to do then?  
  
They couldn't stay in his room forever, he knew that, and then what? He could turn off his emotions with the best of them, but he had no idea how to sit out there in class and not want this feeling, to not want  _Kurt_.   
  
 _You'll hear me say that I'm...so lucky to be lovin you..._  
  
Kurt did this thing where he would sing part of a line under his breath, as though unable to help himself. Blaine understood completely; there were times a feeling couldn't be summed up by words alone, and expressing it in song at least came closer. But the way Kurt would do it, then hesitate and blush and roll his eyes at himself as though he knew better but had done it anyway was the most adorable, endearing thing Blaine had ever seen.   
  
He cupped Kurt's jaw in his palm, running his thumb slowly over Kurt's cheek, and Kurt's eyes fluttered closed as he let out a quiet sigh of contentment. "I wish we could just stay here," he murmured, and Kurt nodded against his hand. "Without any intrusion. Just us, you know?"  
  
"Me too," Kurt replied softly. "It's so hard to pretend I don't want to touch you out there. These things you do to me," he added with a self-deprecating smile. "I never used to want to touch anyone. Now this is all I can think about." His voice was dreamy, awed even, and Blaine couldn't help himself from leaning in and kissing Kurt's lips gently. Kurt's torso shifted closer again, tucked tightly against him now, but not in an erotic way whatsoever.  
  
"The same," Blaine whispered back. Kurt nodded again and they lay still for a few minutes, nothing but the sound of one song switching to [another](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1tv0RHooaE) and the quiet chirp of birds outside. Spring was beginning to creep back from the depths of the snow-covered ground now, and the first few birds were beginning to reappear. It felt like years had passed since January; it was only March. It seemed like a century since he'd met Kurt - how had he known this boy so little time and yet felt like he couldn't imagine a time without him?  
  
When did he become the type of boy who could be smitten with someone? Was that even what this was? It certainly felt like the movie soundtracks sounded.  
  
What was he supposed to do in a few months? he wondered suddenly with alarm. How had he not even thought about it until now? He was graduating in only a few months, and Kurt had another year. And then what? What were they supposed to do when all of this ended in June? Go back to being the boy who tried to pretend to never care? Or become the robotic, empty shell of an adult that he would one day be required to turn into?  
  
"Kurt?" he asked awkwardly, not sure how to phrase what he wanted to ask. This was a problem a lot of boys had with the girls they'd been going with, he knew that - he'd heard Wes lament that his girlfriend didn't want to go to Massachusetts with him, and David's girlfriend had gotten a scholarship to somewhere in Texas that he wouldn't in a million years set foot in. But they'd known each other such a short amount of time that even asking it felt absurd.   
  
"Yes?"  
  
"Do you ever think about...what we do next?"  
  
"I was going to see about a movie," Kurt replied. "It was nice at that place. Though Rachel is trying to insist on coming along this time. I think she's just lonely out there with no one to tell her how great she is, but she keeps insisting that as her faux-boyfriend I still have a duty to take her out. But if you would rather go somewhere else, I'm all for it."   
  
He wanted to tell Kurt that wasn't what he meant at all, that he wasn't worried about what to do next Friday, or the next Saturday, or the weekend after that. They could stay here and be like this, or if they had to move somewhere else he supposed the drive-in was nice enough and it was reassuring that others like them were there and not getting caught or telling anyone's secrets. He had enjoyed himself and suspected that would be the case even if Rachel tagged along - she wasn't nearly as bad as Kurt made her out to be, she was kind of amusing in her own quirky and super-intense way.   
  
Next week wasn't what he was worried about.   
  
What was he supposed to do when they had to leave this room and he had to go back to not noticing other boys? When he had to stop looking for Kurt's head bobbing head of him in the hallway? When he had to go back to being on all day, every day, all the time, because he wouldn't even have this tiny sliver of a safe-haven?  
  
He was being ridiculous, he told himself; it had been barely a few weeks. Asking Kurt about the future now would be presumptuous and...what kind of future did they even have, anyway? Two boys out in the world together- that wasn't the future. That was what he could do until he had to grow up and lose his soul.   
  
Just like he would have to one day give up music and emotion and feeling vibrantly alive, he would have to give up all this. Marry some nice girl, a daughter of a friend of a business associate of his father who came to a Christmas party and smiled charmingly enough. Step up and take responsibility for everything he was being entrusted with, everything his father had worked to provide.  
  
It made him want to cry, but he didn't dare show it.  
  
"Take Rachel out," Blaine instructed. They needed to get used to reality; he couldn't let himself forget about the world outside his room no matter how nice it would be. "I'm meant to call Jean anyway."  
  
" _No_."  
  
Kurt's sudden sharp tone as he pushed away from Blaine made him look up in surprise. Kurt sat up, legs dangling over the side of the bed, and looked back over his shoulder at Blaine with angry, frustrated,  _hurt_  eyes. "We're not doing that," he stated coldly.  
  
"Kurt-"  
  
"No, Blaine. If we're together, then we're together, and I understand why you're  _uncomfortable_  telling people that." The way he said 'uncomfortable' made him exponentially moreso, as though it were some sort of personal character flaw, a silly line he had drawn in the sand and refused to cross for no other reason than pride. Kurt was the only person Blaine knew who could wield his naivete like a weapon like that, launching it at those who knew better as though it was the well-informed person's fault for not just blindly trusting in it all. He sat up, crossing his arms over his chest, and shifted uncomfortably. "I'm not saying we have to be public about any of this. But I'm not going to be some secret you forget about when you want to feel normal again. If you want to date a girl, then I'm sorry, but we can't do this."  
  
A momentary panic fluttered through him, the thought of losing Kurt almost physically painful to even contemplate. But he wasn't about to start begging. "What about you and Rachel?" he flung back, frustrated.  
  
Kurt looked at him as though he'd lost his mind, eyebrows lowered in skepticism as he replied, "She knows what this is. She doesn't think we're going together, she knows the truth about me. What about  _Jean_? Does she know?" he asked pointedly. His tone made clear he knew the answer to that.  
  
Of course Jean didn't know. She would never know. He wasn't going to tell anyone - Rachel knew by accident, and of course Kurt knew, and if that was all the bigger the club got then he was more than happy to keep it that way. What was he supposed to say to her anyway? "I'm sorry, Jean, I really like you but I'm a homosexual and secretly in love with my best friend, Kurt. I'm sure you understand. I'll call you next week to see what our glee clubs can set up for once Regionals are over. It's been fun!" wasn't going to fly.   
  
She would be hurt by it, and understandably so. And the warnings about women scorned existed for a reason. The last thing he needed would be for her to take out her revenge the best and easiest way she knew how: by telling people.  
  
"Of course not," Blaine replied softly.  
  
"Then it's different than Rachel and I. If Rachel comes out with us one weekend, her presence won't stop us from holding hands. If Jean comes out..." He let the sentence trail off, but Blaine understood what he meant.  
  
It wasn't nearly as different as Kurt thought, but he wasn't sure how to break that to him. Both were about perception.   
  
"I want to believe you're in this," Kurt stated quietly. His hands rested in his lap and he stared awkwardly at his fingers. "But if she's still in the picture, then you aren't. It's as simple as that."   
  
It wasn't nearly that simple once they left the room, Blaine wanted to point out. It wasn't nearly that simple when they left the safety of his dorm, where they could be open and honest without fear of what that would expose them to. When they got into the halls of Dalton, let alone beyond the safe haven of campus and into the hostile, hate-filled world he had learned to fear practically from infancy...then what? What was he supposed to do when they were out in town and he couldn't let anyone know his secret? At least Kurt had Rachel if people started asking questions - what did he have?  
  
But he didn't know if he could trade away  _this_. Not without a damn good reason.  
  
"So what do you want to do this weekend?" he asked finally. Kurt looked at him curiously, seeming to ask if he really meant what Kurt thought he might mean. He held out his hand, and Kurt shifted on the bed to more easily grasp it. "Are there any movies playing?"  
  
* * * * *  
  
Of the many problems with attending a school that required strict adherence to a uniform policy, the one Kurt found most obvious was this:  
  
The longer he spent only being able to dream about his clothes instead of actually wearing them, the more outfits he planned out and desperately wanted to wear such that when the opportunity to wear something different presented itself, the task of narrowing down the field of contenders to just one outfit seemed impossible.  
  
He knew logically that only Blaine and Rachel would see him. And of those two, Blaine was most used to seeing him in uniform and obviously didn't put too much stock in how he was dressed, and Rachel would wear something hideous that would make even one of his less-planned outfits seem chic by comparison. But he wanted to look perfect.  
  
There weren't very many opportunities for Blaine to see him as  _him_ , as someone other than "Boy number 143 in that same uniform," and it was important to him that Blaine see all of him.  
  
So the question quickly became, which ensemble most accurately and succinctly said "This is Kurt Hummel" while remaining relatively comfortable enough for the confines of the car. That it was still cold out, particularly at night, meant he was free to select from his several jackets, which made him happy, but there were too many choices for his shoes and that didn't even get into the question of which shirt or pants to wear - let alone accessories-  
  
"What are you doing?" Sam asked from the desk as Kurt flicked frustratedly through the hangers in the closet.  
  
"Trying to pick an outfit for tomorrow."  
  
"You have a date or something?"  
  
He did, Kurt thought with a grin. He did, he had a  _second_  date. A second date he thought he would never in a million years have considering how skittish Blaine was about all of this. A second date that Blaine had asked for, even.  
  
A second date that Blaine had asked for instead of going out with Jean.  
  
He was still trying not to get his hopes up. He was still trying to tell himself that he was expecting too much and seeing hope where there was none, but he had a hard time really ratcheting down his expectations when Blaine flat-out chose him over a girl.  
  
"Yes," he replied simply. The benefit of Rachel going along, too, was that he wouldn't have to actually lie about any of it. He wondered if he should encourage Blaine in the direction of having a fake girlfriend, because there were advantages. It did make things simpler, he supposed, even if Rachel could be frustrating sometimes. She wasn't so bad - and it did make it nice to be able to talk to someone. Blaine deserved to have that, and since he couldn't talk to anyone at school - except him, of course - maybe it would be good for him  
  
"What are you doing, anyway?" he asked Sam. "You said the tutoring made your homework take less time, but every time I see you you're still studying."  
  
"What? Oh, no, this is..." Sam grinned and ducked his head, blushing a little behind his thick glasses. "Personal project."  
  
"Oh?" Kurt asked, turning to look at him curiously. "Do tell."  
  
He understood Sam said something about 'rockets' - beyond that, he wasn't sure he got any of it. Rockets and some design out of a movie and making it actually work by changing the angle of the fins and building models...and there was an impression in there somewhere of who Kurt suspected was the lead actor in the film, but he didn't ask.   
  
It was good seeing Sam excited about something, but Kurt had his limits.  
  
Sam was just starting into a description of the types of aliens the ship had carried when there was a loud, hurried knock at the door. As Kurt was closer, he strode over and opened it to find Wes and David outside, looking excited and just a little breathless, as though they'd run from across campus to deliver good news. "Yes?" he asked, wondering what in the world the two of them would have to possibly tell him. Council nominations weren't even due for another month and he didn't have nearly the clout - or temperament - for that position, so he knew it couldn't be that. If something were wrong, Wes wouldn't be smiling (and who knew that Wes smiled? Kurt was used to seeing him stone-faced). And on 99% of scenarios Kurt could come up with, Blaine would be the one coming to deliver the news.   
  
"You went to McKinley, correct?" Wes asked.  
  
"Right," Kurt replied slowly. None of the possible reasons they could be coming to see him involved that as the opening question.  
  
"The news just broke in with a special report - something's going on," David stated, his words crisp with excitement.  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"We think it might be something about the lawsuit," Wes reported.  
  
That got Kurt's attention. He hurried back into the room long enough to toe on his loafers, glad for the first time in his life for the simple footwear, and followed them quickly down the hall. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had held oral arguments back sometime before Christmas, he knew that much and had been attempting to obtain a transcript but apparently those were not easily released to "disinterested parties." He had tried to point out the clerk - a rather polite gentleman who didn't sound much older than Kurt was, but who had continuously referred to Kurt as 'miss' during the course of their phone conversation - that anyone who had spent as much time calling and requesting the transcript clearly had at least  _some_  level of interest, but apparently it was a more specific legal term that the clerk refused to explain further. He wondered if one day the document would turn up in the Dalton Library, given its history of having random and obscure documents culled from sources without any rhyme or reason; he had a better chance of convincing the clerk of his interest than he did of the library getting it in a timely manner.  
  
From what he could gather from his biweekly conversations with Mercedes, no one knew when a decision might come, but Kurt had assumed it would be like every other development in the case thus far: there would be a lead-up. When the decision to close the schools had first been announced, it came after weeks of tension and a series of violent nights wherein Mr. Jones had sent Mercedes and John to stay at the Hummels' because there was a legitimate fear of arson from a few of the obnoxious drunks who lived just outside town and liked to cause trouble. The announcement that McKinley would be closed for the year came after weeks of terse negotiations covered every night by the local news, with Asian parents lamenting that their children were being denied educational opportunities and white parents complaining about the moral decay of the town and black parents shown either milling around in the background as if they didn't care, or shouting from behind a police barricade as though they posed more threat than a wild animal. By the time both of those announcements came, everyone knew what was going on and had a sense of what was going to happen.  
  
This...this was sudden. He wondered if maybe it was just because he'd been more than two hours away from home, but he suspected his dad would have mentioned something if it were starting to ramp up again. Or Mercedes, if she noticed things were getting more tense - sometimes it didn't even register with her because she was so used to it. Or Rachel would have said something, since she seemed to be paying even more attention to the proceedings than he was; whether it was out of a sense of justice or because she wanted to know how much longer she would have to wait before making her triumphant return to the McKinley stage, he wasn't sure.  
  
He followed Wes and David quickly out of Everett House and next door to the Senior Student Room, the lounge housed on the first floor of the senior dorm which held the largest and newest of the four televisions on Dalton campus. Each class had one in their dorm's student room, but as Kurt had discovered circa October, the Juniors' television was small, got horrible reception, and always had at least ten boys crowded around it clamouring to watch one of the three channels. Not only was the Senior Student Room much nicer, it was nearly silent as all eyes fixed on the news report.  
  
It was surreal to see people he knew on television. Finn had been on the local news once, interviewed before the Homecoming game his junior year, but they'd been at the game so they hadn't actually seen it. While Mercedes and her family weren't named parties in the case, he did know a few of the students standing up there. Mary had been Mercedes' lab partner in junior high, and there she was with an elegant coat over a dress, looking prim and put-together as she stood between her parents with a confused smile as though she knew she was meant to be happy but wasn't sure what had just happened. And there were a couple boys John had played basketball with, whom Kurt had met in passing a few times but not enough to know any of their names, in ties and overcoats and big grins. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder across the top step in front of the Federal Courthouse in Cincinnati, and even through the microphone it was easy to hear the commotion going on around them - screams and insults and cheers all rolled together in one ball of static noise that almost overpowered the speaker at the podium.  
  
Kurt recognized the speaker from previous news stories. The Asian students had as their advocate a Japanese man who stood proudly and spoke as though he was giving a speech for a thousand people, but the attorney representing the black students was a decidedly less-elegant white man. Harlan Lowne looked to be in a constant state of frenzy, like he had too few assistants and was always struggling to keep up with his workload. Given the magnitude of the case he'd been trying, Kurt could imagine that might be the case. With wild white hair that never laid flat and neat as it should and a cheap suit, he looked nothing like the big-city lawyer one would have expected on a matter like this. Kurt knew he wasn't too local, he'd never met the man, but he wasn't based out of Columbus or Cincinnati either. A part of him had always wondered how this man came to be the face of something so important - a question that resurfaced as he watched Lowne grip the edges of the podium as if he was so nervous he might fall over.  
  
But when he spoke, everything changed. He opened his mouth and sounded like the most flamboyant of trial attorneys, the sort of advocate who would stop at nothing to zealously defend his clients and the principles for which they stood, even if it meant resorting to shaming an entire community.   
  
"Today," he said in a strong voice as full of pride as it was of exhaustion, "I am pleased to say that the rule of law has won out."  
  
A cheer went up from the crowd, and the line of students and their parents behind him applauded behind him. Mary's mother looked relieved, eyes skyward as she mouthed praise to God for it being so.  
  
That...that was good, then? Kurt wondered as he slipped onto an empty space at the end of the couch. A few students looked over curiously as though unsure why he was in the wrong Student Room, but Wes gave a quick shake of his head and the students shrugged and went back to watching. Apparently Warblers really could get away with anything.  
  
It was hard to tell precisely who was cheering and who was shouting, but if Kurt had to judge based on looking at the faces behind Lowne, at the way the attorney seemed as though he was forcibly trying to keep a giant grin off his face, that had to mean-  
  
They had won. They had  _won_.   
  
Was that even possible?  
  
"In a unanimous opinion penned by Judge Patrick Sullivan, the Sixth Circuit has recognized the fundamental truth that  _Brown v. Board of Education_  is applicable to  _all_  public schools across this country - not even merely the schools that want to integrate, but each and every institution, from the depths of the segregationist South all the way to right here in Lima, Ohio." Kurt didn't care that technically they were in Cincinnati and Lima was nearly 4 hours away - he couldn't get past the fact that it was  _happening_. Of course it should happen, but it should have happened all along. He'd jumped up and down with Mercedes over the ruling in the first place nearly five years ago, when what was becoming known as "Brown II" had been decided. Then they'd waited, then everything had started going downhill until now here they were and it was honestly and truly becoming a reality?   
  
"This decision represents a victory not just for these young men and women behind me, but for all colored children in this state. It states-" He flipped through a thick packet of papers in front of him until he found the quote he was looking for. Kurt wondered how much time he'd had to even read the document. "'As the Supreme Court stated in  _Brown_  and affirmed in  _Cooper v. Aaron_ , and as we reaffirm today, the sum of one's educational opportunities is far greater than its parts - bricks and mortar alone do not make a school. Also inherent to a child's experience is another type of lesson: one of social rules, of interaction with one's peers, of where the child fits into the world. As was clearly demonstrated by the studies relied upon in  _Brown_ , where young colored children are told every day that they are not worthy of attendance at school with their white peers, then their sense of self, worth, and belonging are irreversibly damaged.' This decision affirms everything we have been saying since this case began: these children and their parents are not looking for anything special. They aren't seeking a single right beyond what their white counterparts at William McKinley High School have had: the right to attend a school where they can obtain not only the requisite knowledge but the motivation to make their way in the world. Given the sweeping nature of the Ohio Civil Rights Act signed into law just one year ago, I would say that this benefits the white students as well - where better to learn to get along in a world of many races?"  
  
Kurt's head was spinning. Of course they were right, the man was saying everything he'd been saying since he had sat in his room the summer of 1956 and read the entire Brown decision (all the while wishing he had a legal dictionary of some kind) to figure out when that meant he and Mercedes got to go to the same school. And even though Mercedes let a lot of it roll off her back, maybe more than she should, he felt-  
  
It was stupid, maybe, but he felt like he understood.  
  
He knew the way he was treated was nothing like the way Mercedes was treated; he knew that no amount of strange looks and disgusted shakes of the head could ever compare to the fact that Mercedes was flat-out barred from going into certain restaurants, or that her dad's practice could barely stay afloat sometimes because of how many people in their town were terrified of having their teeth examined by a man who wasn't white. They weren't the same thing.  
  
But sometimes it felt the same. Especially when he looked at people like Blaine - Blaine who was so convinced that he had to be wrong because it was all he'd ever been told, day in and day out from god-only-knew what age. Six months ago, had he known about himself what he knew now, he would've said there was no way that there would ever be a time or place where boys like him could be treated equally or told they weren't perverse or inverted or whatever other phrase one might use.  
  
But then, six months ago he would also have said that there wouldn't be a place like  _this_. That, even though  _he_  knew Mercedes being black didn't matter and that all the rest was just prejudice, other people would never understand it the way he did.   
  
As he looked around the Student Room, though, and saw all of these boys - of every colour, side-by-side, honestly not seeing why Wes, David, and Thad "shouldn't" all be together on Council...they were looking at each other with the same sort of pitying, confused look usually reserved for news reports of the poor people of Soviet Russia who couldn't buy the things they needed, or the native people of undeveloped countries in their funny costumes in National Geographic. Who were these people in Lima who needed to be  _told_  that people were equal? How funny it would be if it weren't so sad. What sort of backwards tribe were they to not know something so basic and  _simple_?  
  
As Lowne finished his speech, reporters began clamouring for attention. The first person called-on asked the question that was on everyone's minds - especially Kurt's: "So what will happen now?"  
  
"Well," Lowne said with an exhausted grin, as though the only thing he could think about was finally getting to sleep a full night now that the process was over. "The City of Lima of course has the option to appeal, but considering the fact that the United States Supreme Court has settled this question of law pretty firmly over the past six years, most recently in the case out of Virginia last year, I would think that would be a waste of everyone's time and money. Assuming they let the ruling stand, which I believe would be wise under the circumstances-" There was a chuckle across the crowd: of course the attorney for the students would think that the city would be wise not to appeal a ruling in the students' favour. "-then today's decision makes it pretty clear. The Court in  _Brown_  said that desegregation must occur 'with all deliberate speed,' and it's been almost five years now. So the decision orders the City of Lima to reopen all public schools, fully integrated, immediately."  
  
Kurt's eyes widened. Was that the end of it then? Did that mean-...they were back to everything they'd planned, just a year late?   
  
It felt almost too good to believe, but he wasn't about to take the fantastic news for granted.  
  
Almost breathless and unable to keep the grin off his face, he jumped up and hurried toward the door. Blaine had slipped in sometime after Kurt had, and he stood near the wall just barely inside the room. "Hey!" he whispered, cognizant of the fact that everyone else was watching the broadcast. "Did you hear?" When Blaine nodded that he had, an almost-stunned look on his face, Kurt just beamed even more broadly. Blaine could be as pessimistic as he wanted, but he had won.  _They_  had won. And one day, he would convince Blaine that just like the people in his town had been wrong about Mercedes and would have to move past it whether they liked it or not, people would one day see them as something other than sick, dangerous creatures.   
  
The world could change. It was already changing, and there were so many possibilities.  
  
Clapping his hands together in excitement, he added a quick, "I have to go call Mercedes" before hurrying back toward Everett House. He couldn't wait to get her on the phone and jump about the ruling long-distance.   
  
Then they had plans to make. He wondered if it was too early to start selecting her audition number for glee club.


	28. Chapter 28

Sitting at his desk, Blaine wasn't exactly sure what he should be feeling. What he should do now. The only thing he could say for sure was that Calculus homework was definitely not getting done any time soon.

He understood why Kurt was excited - he really did. While he couldn't fathom liking another school as well as he liked Dalton, based on his own experience at his previous school and just how amazing the atmosphere was here, he understood that it wasn't somewhere Kurt had ever particularly wanted to be. Kurt hadn't come here willingly, he'd been forced to after his old school had closed in a fit of bigotry. It wasn't home for Kurt the way it was for him, he understood that - vaguely. He at least knew it in theory, if not in practice.

And he understood that Kurt missed his friends, that he missed Rachel and Mercedes - and his family, because Kurt actually liked his family and didn't feel like he was suffocating when he was near them. After meeting the Hummels, Blaine could understand why. Plus Kurt had told him about planning everything out for the past several years, going to school with Mercedes and being in glee club and having the same classes and getting to be like any other pair of best friends in school. He could appreciate why that was something that was important to Kurt.

But what Blaine couldn't appreciate was how jubilant Kurt was, even in face of the fact that going back to McKinley meant leaving more than just a school.

It was stupid, Blaine knew, and he was being an idiot if he thought that he should be enough to sway Kurt's decision. After all, they hadn't known each other for very long and homosexuals were not generally able to form long-term attachments with one another - or so his father claimed, and he was beginning to think that part might at least be accurate. Every story he could remember involved how the patients bounced from man to man, and while the report Kurt had shown him seemed to be suggesting otherwise Blaine wasn't so sure he knew what it was saying; the notion of "homosexual marriage" was so absurd as to not even have meaning. Men like himself, whether it turned out they were sick or not, or dangerous or not, were almost primal without the nurturing, settling influence of women around, so this feeling-

The idea of Kurt leaving, of the boy not being there anymore, of not being able to talk to him in the dining hall or at Warbler practice, of not being able to walk next door and see him when things got so overwhelming and terrifying that he thought the only way he would be able to breathe again was by seeing Kurt and hearing his dry-yet-sweet reassurances...

...of not being able to see him anymore. Touch him. Kiss him. Even go to that damned drive-in with him- because he knew better than to think that things wouldn't change if Kurt left. He wouldn't be able to just go over to Kurt's house two hours away every weekend and hang out in his room. The Hummels would talk, they would get suspicious, they would know - not just about him, but about Kurt, and then where would the poor boy be? Probably dragged off to an expert like his own father and the idea of that happening to Kurt was almost more than he could bear. He couldn't expect Kurt to come back out every weekend, not when his girlfriend lived in town and he didn't have enough close friends at Dalton to merit that sort of trip so often. 

He wasn't a fool; he knew absence didn't make the heart grow fonder nearly as often as trite cliches would dictate. More often it made the heart grow cold, distant, as the burning and undeniable love began to ache, then fade, then wither, until nothing remained but fond memories and a sort of nostalgia. Given a few weeks Kurt would barely remember him, he imagined.

Which wasn't to say that he would be innocent in all of this. 

Kurt had ignited something in him, had made him feel so much more intensely and left him unable to deny the-...condition he had. For months, whenever he felt like he might be okay, like he might not be-...that way, like he could control himself even if he was...the second he was around Kurt - hell, sometimes even the second he thought of Kurt - he couldn't fight it quite as hard. The way Kurt smiled at him, the way his flexible body moved as he strode down the hallway, the way he bounced on the balls of his feet a little when he was excited about something- it was as though every tiny thing about him was a swing of the hammer against a chisel designed to break down his defenses and leave him exposed.

But if Kurt wasn't around...if Kurt went back to Lima with his friends and his girlfriend...He didn't know if he would be able to stop fighting anymore. He would go back to being how he'd been, and as miserable as he was sometimes now when he thought too hard about who he was, it was nothing compared to the months of agony that had preceded it. 

If Kurt went back, he would return to how he'd been for so long, and he didn't know if he could do that anymore without feeling like he was being crushed. It felt the same way he felt when he thought about the fact that, in a few years, he would have to grow up and abandon music entirely.

He knew there had been times he'd been happy before he'd met Kurt, he remembered smiling and it wasn't always pretend. At Dalton it had been genuine, at least. So why did the idea of not seeing this boy all the time make him feel like this?

As he stared at the book in front of him and tried in vain to work through problems, he heard a knock on the door. Almost certainly Kurt - that was the only person who really came to his room barring a Warbler emergency of some kind. For a moment he considered telling the boy to go away, or pretending he wasn't there, because he wasn't sure he could watch Kurt so excited about his new school, so excited about leaving him - even if that wasn't Kurt's intention - without feeling like he might start crying. But a more logical part of him pointed out that, if he really was getting a limited amount of time with Kurt, did he really want to waste it attempting to be stoic?

With a sigh, he dragged himself out of the chair and padded to the door. Kurt looked so ecstatic, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he automatically entered the room and practically launched himself onto the bed, that it made Blaine's heart ache. "So Mercedes is happy?"

"Of course. Mostly she's glad she doesn't have to keep going to the library every day," he replied with a grin. He laid on his stomach, feet waving rhythmically in the air behind him in such a way that Blaine half-expected there to be a telephone in Kurt's hand while he twirled the cord around his finger. "They're preparing for a lot of backlash and everything, though. I can only imagine what the brain trusts back there are going to do in the face of being told their antiquated backwater attitudes are still illegal six years later." He rolled his eyes but didn't look nearly as cynical as Blaine would have guessed earlier in the year. 

Why should he be? Blaine supposed. This was a victory. Sometimes despite all the odds, progress did happen, and of course Kurt should be celebrating that.

"So when do you go back?" he asked quietly. Kurt's feet stopped moving, and he sent a confused, serious look in Blaine's direction. That wasn't what he'd wanted - he wasn't trying to be that kind of guy. He wanted Kurt to be happy - really, he did. He liked seeing Kurt excited and optimistic. It wasn't Kurt's fault that he was going to suffer as a result. He put on a happier face and asked, "Do you need help packing?"

"What? Oh - no, they can't actually...'immediate' doesn't actually mean immediate. Because it's so late in the year, the head of the School Board made a speech that they're beginning the process of reallocating all the buildings and faculty and everything, but they can't start the term only two months before the end of the year. So far no one's said they're going to challenge it. Probably because the Asian school has their own schedule and want to finish out the year, and it's too late to be eligible for any sports championships or anything so no one at McKinley is too enthusiastic about jumping back into the year. Everyone starts together in September. Besides, my tuition here been paid through the end of the year so even if they were starting school again tomorrow, Dad wouldn't let me transfer back after money's been spent like that." Blaine tried not to look as relieved as he felt - Kurt wasn't leaving. He wasn't transferring back, he was staying, he was staying here and would be at Dalton for as long as Blaine would- "Why?" Kurt asked with a sly grin that attempted to feign innocence but ended up looking more devious than anything.

"I wanted to be helpful if you needed it?" Blaine tried.

"Something tells me that your concern over my ability to pack all my belongings into two suitcases wasn't why you asked when I was leaving," Kurt replied pointedly with an expression that clearly said 'How dumb do you think I am, Blaine?' 

Kurt had backed him into a corner and seemed almost proud of it. He could try and deny it, but it wouldn't be particularly convincing and his heart wasn't in it. "I..." He hesitated, sitting heavily in his chair. "You know that I'm happy for you - and for Mercedes, and all your friends who can now go back to living their lives. But I can't say that I was happy at the prospect of you leaving," he admitted.

Kurt looked surprised for a moment, and Blaine wasn't sure why. He'd thought he had made his feelings clear in the past, that he did care deeply about Kurt and felt much better when he was around, so it was strange that Kurt would be caught off-guard by the admission. Had it not occurred to Kurt what he would give up by transferring back? That almost seemed more likely...and more offputting.

"I would...really miss you, Kurt," he admitted quietly, and Kurt's eyes got even wider and a bit misty. "If you were leaving. And when I leave."

He knew that his time at Dalton was quickly running out, but he hadn't put too much thought into it; he couldn't. He couldn't start thinking yet about the college letters that were trickling in, about the pressure and the family obligations that would come with it, about the constant questions about his grades and his ambitions and whether he was honouring the family name with his performance. It would mean leaving the place he'd felt at home for four years, all the people he'd grown close to-

And the Warblers.

And Kurt.

Kurt pulled himself slowly into a sitting position and regarding Blaine carefully before venturing, "You know...this doesn't all have to end in June." His tone was cautious, as though he wasn't sure he could even suggest such a thing without Blaine bolting from his own room or never speaking to him again.

"What do you mean?"

"There's no rule that says what we have has to be over as soon as we're not in the same place. Leroy talks about men who found each other when they were in the Navy, and none of them were in the same place very long - for all we know they could have stayed together long after they were deployed. Why would we be any different?"

"Wait - who's Leroy?"

"Rachel's father's lover." Blaine had no idea what to make of that, of how openly and dismissively Kurt said it as though that were common knowledge that everyone just accepted - something he certainly couldn't fathom. He'd known of homosexual men with wives and children who were sexual with men outside of their sacred union, but none who would admit it so freely as Kurt seemed to. "We don't have to go our separate ways and never see each other again just because you graduate this year. Couples date long-distance. Considering how many boys at this school are dating girls they only see every few weekends, it would hardly be that much of a stretch."

"It's different," Blaine pointed out, wishing he didn't have to. He wished Kurt could understand that without being told, that he could get the ways they couldn't be like everyone else. 

"Only if we say it is," Kurt replied. He raised an eyebrow in Blaine's direction, and Blaine moved his chair closer to where Kurt was on the bed. "I know it hasn't been that long, and we have plenty of time to...figure everything out. But I would miss you too. I was on the phone with Mercedes, then my dad, then Mercedes again, and at some point it hit me that as excited as I am that Mercedes and I can go back to the life we had planned..."

He trailed off, and Blaine was almost afraid to fill in the end of the sentence. Kurt had realized what transferring back would mean and couldn't be as happy as he otherwise would have been. Kurt felt the same emptiness and near-dread as he did. He doubted that was actually true, but maybe-

"Same here," he replied quietly with a half-smile. It felt like admitting too much, like he was letting Kurt know how afraid he was of the end of the year. How terrified he was about who he would become if he had to go back to being that boy who hated everything he felt. How much it felt like Kurt was the one who made everything okay.

Kurt looked at him for a moment, head tilted just a bit with a curious look, then moved up to sit with his back against the headboard. He glanced at the empty space beside him, then at Blaine, and Blaine understood the invitation. He pushed himself up and moved to sit beside Kurt. "Do you know what you're doing next year?" he asked quietly, hands playing nervously in his lap.

So Kurt was as worried about it as he was. It was oddly comforting and at the same time a huge development. He wasn't sure how, considering he already knew how Kurt felt about him and he knew their affection was mutual, but taking the step from discussing what to do next weekend to what they did next year and beyond...He had wanted to ask before but felt so ridiculous that he was glad Kurt had made the move. "No," he replied softly as he held out his hand. Kurt's palm slipped into place easily, fingers curling around his, and Blaine found himself staring at their intertwined hands as he added, "Letters are starting to come back in, but I don't know yet."

"Where did you apply?"

"Everywhere," Blaine replied with a faint, exasperated smile. "Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, Columbia-"

"In New York?" Though Kurt's voice was still quiet, there was an excited quality to it as though Kurt were trying so hard to hold back the inner desire to jump up and down; it sounded like Kurt had looked when he arrived at the room.

"Yeah. My father won't be happy to find out I even applied anywhere except Yale and Princeton, but I thought maybe..." Thought maybe what, he wasn't sure. Thought maybe he would abandon all familial and societal obligations and responsibilities to turn down an Ivy League legacy and follow dreams he wasn't sure what to do with? 

"You could go to New York," Kurt filled in.

"Maybe. I hear it's amazing. Broadway alone..." He had thought about it when he'd applied, of being able to just go over and see shows. Watch the magic up there onstage. And he knew there were a lot of places to sing in New York, a lot of small clubs and bars and places he could go if he needed to. He remembered enjoying the little bar Kurt's friends went to, how good it felt to just let it all out up there and be applauded by a room full of mostly strangers. That could be enough to get by on, he supposed, even if he had to grow up soon.

"No, I meant...you can go to New York. And then in a year I'll be there too."

Blaine looked over in confusion. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I'm going to New York when I'm done with high school. I've planned on it since I was six and heard 'Give My Regards to Broadway' for the first time. And now especially..." His smile turned just a little shy as he squeezed Blaine's hand and rested his head on Blaine's shoulder. The weight felt nice, and being able to smell Kurt's shampoo and feel the soft, fluffy hair against his own neck felt almost luxurious, like a privilege he hadn't been allowed to indulge in before. In a way he hadn't; before the smell of Kurt had been something illicit, hidden, something he could never tell a soul, but Kurt was right here and knew how close they were and something about that simple fact made everything just the tiniest bit brighter. 

"Why now?" he asked quietly.

Kurt didn't answer the question but let out a soft, contented sigh. "It would be incredible," he stated confidently, but his voice was quiet. "We would have an apartment - I would decorate, of course, I have it all planned already. And we would have an entire circle of creative, talented, interesting friends - all the beautiful people from magazines, you know? Musicians and people on Broadway and of course the best of the fashion world. The parties would be legendary, with grand tales of people's adventures and run-ins with famous photographers. The clothes alone would be worth seeing." Blaine had never thought a party could sound good before - he was used to them and tired of them beyond what he could express. Parties were exhausting. They left his jaw aching from fake-smiling too long, his head itching from the extra hair product to hold his curls down and in place all night, his shoulders sore from standing so stiffly for so many hours. But the way Kurt described it, it sounded wonderful.

Or, he amended, even if the party itself was like everything he'd spent a lifetime trying to avoid, at least Kurt's marvel at it all sounded wonderful.

If only things worked like that. If only parties were more than a few dozen people all trying to simultaneously boost their own egos while drinking enough to keep themselves from realizing how dull it all was. If only things could be as joyous as Kurt thought they should be. 

Though Kurt had been right about other things. At least a little bit.

"We would sing duets together," Kurt added, lifting his head to look at him. 

The idea of singing with anyone else had never seemed half as appealing as singing to Kurt seemed in that moment. "'Baby It's Cold Outside'?" he suggested, unable to keep the nervous but genuine smile off his face.

Kurt beamed for a moment, then caught himself and pulled his grin back into a more manageable level. "That would be a must at our annual Christmas Soiree," he replied. "We'll sound great together."

"We already do," Blaine pointed out. If they hadn't, it wouldn't have scared him so much. He could never resist Kurt when he sang.

"And after everyone leaves..." Kurt began, hesitating for a moment.

"Yeah?"

"...nevermind."

Now he was intrigued. "What?"

Kurt shook his head and started to pull his hand away. "It's ridiculous, Blaine, don't-"

"No, c'mon." Blaine caught his hand before he could move far, and Kurt looked up at him, eyes wide and a little nervous as though he was trying so hard to put up a wall but couldn't build it as fast as it kept crumbling back down. "After everyone leaves, what?" he prompted gently.

"I just have this fantasy where we'll...sit around in our immaculate living room reading and listening to music. I know it's stupid, but I can't help it. Whenever I shove it away, it comes back." He tried to sound as though he didn't care, but his eyes gave him away.

"It's not stupid," Blaine assured him. "It sounds..."

Simple. Uncomplicated. Quiet. 

Ordinary.

Impossible.

"...like a really great fantasy," he replied quietly, dropping his gaze. If he kept looking at Kurt's earnest face, he would start wanting things he couldn't have again. He'd been able to believe that maybe some of this wasn't wrong and maybe not all of it was going to end in disaster, but there was still nowhere in the world that could happen. No place in the universe that the two of them could stay like this. They needed to grow up eventually, and sooner was probably better than later. The longer they stayed like this the more he wanted - and not just touching or kissing. Those were primal and appeared in quick flashes of heat and want. The harder desires to dismiss were things like Kurt described - being around each other. Being close. Talking together and laughing and holding hands and singing duets.

"It can be real," Kurt replied, his voice earnest as he seemed to understand what was making Blaine pull back. "If we want it to be."

"Kurt...I want it to be, you have no idea how much. But there's nowhere we could go that would make what you're' talking about possible."

"Sure there is. If Rachel's father can do it in Ohio, then we can certainly do it in New York. Leroy said to find places there were others like us - New York has homosexuals, Blaine, apparently in droves if the articles I've found are any indication. Plus the number of sailors alone - I've seen pictures. There are bound to be more of us there."

The thing was, he wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe Kurt was right. He wanted to think that maybe things could be safe somewhere outside his room, if only because he was going to have to leave eventually - they both were. But the idea of being able to live somewhere and be open about how he felt...even if Kurt was right about the fact that he wasn't indeed sick, society certainly still viewed them that way. There was nowhere that wasn't the case.

But the picture Kurt painted was so nice...

"Tell me more about the parties," he said quietly, settling back against the headboard. 

"Really." Kurt seemed skeptical, as though he wasn't sure he had just gotten his way or not, and Blaine couldn't entirely blame him. He wasn't wholly convinced, so Kurt hadn't won yet, but maybe...

...maybe if he let himself believe that Kurt believed it, that would be enough of a first step. It had worked with the illness component, hadn't it? 

"Yeah," he replied, and he smiled faintly as he felt Kurt's hand slip into his again. Kurt's cheek leaned against his shoulder as he began to describe the decorating scheme he had already selected and promised to bring pictures the next time he went home for the weekend.

Maybe if he listened long enough, he could forget it was only a dream. Either way, right now, he had Kurt for the next few months and that was worth holding on to.

* * * * *

As far as dates went, Kurt, concluded, this one had all the makings of disaster.

Rachel had been frustrated for several weeks now about the lack of time she got to spend with her boyfriend, however many exaggerated winks she gave when she said the word 'boyfriend,' notwithstanding, and at Blaine's urging Kurt had acquiesced. Yes, he had said, they could go out on Friday. But since the court had issued its ruling earlier in the week, Blaine had seemed much more attached than he used to. Not quite to the point of being dubbed clingy, but much more eager to spend time together as if he had suddenly realized there was an enormous clock ticking over their heads and he didn't want to waste a second. Not that Kurt objected to the extra time and the attention that came with it - spending the afternoon pressed against Blaine's bed while very thoroughly exploring every millimeter of Blaine's mouth was certainly a worthwhile use of time.

Sometimes he caught himself thinking about it during class -on his back, Blaine staring down at him with this expression like he was the most incredible thing Blaine had ever seen before lowering himself and resting most of his weight while they kissed. There was something so amazing about that moment when it happened, something that made him feel so secure and happy and hopeful that it made his chest feel like it might explode and had him letting out quiet happy sighs whenever he thought about it. His French teacher was starting to get annoyed with him.

So he certainly wasn't going to turn down the opportunity to spend time with Blaine on Friday. He liked Rachel more than he ever would have expected to, but he had priorities and she lacked a few key features to ever become one. She, of course, hadn't taken the news very well and had pointed out that it wasn't as though the two of them needed to be alone, anyway. After all, plenty of people went out with more than one person in an evening. When Kurt pointed out, in a hushed hiss with a furtive glance around the hallway to ensure that no one was listening, that very rarely were those situations like what they were discussing here, Rachel had suggested a compromise:

Kurt and Blaine could go out. Rachel would chaperon. 

His immediate response was no. (Actually, to be entirely accurate, his immediate response was to ask whether the Blue Waltz perfume had seeped into her brain and caused permanent damage.) They couldn't be seen together anyway, they certainly didn't need to con a friend into the appearance of behaving the way that he had been stuck chaperoning Finn and Quinn for so many years. Everyone knew chaperons were purely for the value of adults who might see them, and if adults saw him and Blaine together that would be an even bigger problem.

Undeterred, Rachel suggested a more elaborate ruse: Blaine would be their chaperon. No one gave the boy and the chaperon strange looks or assumed the worst, after all, and clearly that would give them the opportunity to go out and enjoy an evening without anyone being any the wiser and while still upholding his portion of the bargain. After all, their relationship wasn't just to provide him with cover, she was supposed to get something out of it too. Just as Kurt was contemplating the fact that Rachel might have a valid point, she had offered her most ridiculous suggestion to date.

"So Blaine can chaperon us to Breadstix."

"Are you out of your mind?" he had hissed. "You don't take a chaperon to dinner where everyone in town can see you and report back, you take the chaperon to the places where teenagers traditionally make out in the back seat of their cars. No one's going to think he's making sure we don't dive across the table and start necking - they're going to assume you're on a date with two boys. Do you know what that makes you?"

"Popular?" Rachel had suggested.

"Not if it's at the same time!"

The car was not actually that much more crowded as they pulled down the dark back road, but with Rachel there it felt like there was no room left in the vehicle. It felt cramped, awkward, and formal. Blaine sat stiffly in his seat, driving in silence with a permanent half-fake smile as though the addition of a third person in the car meant having to pretend to be something he wasn't even if that third person knew exactly what was going on.

Rachel was in the midst of an animated retelling of what was going on with the reallocation of teachers - namely where her mother was going to be teaching now and that no, no one knew who would take leadership of McKinley's glee club because while Mr. Schuester did have seniority and could certainly recognize talent when it was in front of him even if he did occasionally go too far out of his way to include even those members of the club who lacked her training, her mother did have a proven record of success with a myriad of different types of performers which should give her the edge - when Kurt nudged Blaine gently. "Relax," he whispered. "I realize she won't stop talking, but you can still pretend it's just the two of us."

He knew it wasn't entirely the problem. After all, Blaine had been far more standoffish than this when they came out here the first time, and it took seeing that they were safe and unobserved before he began to relax even a little. Blaine was making great strides, even if he wasn't quite there yet; he just needed patience.

The more he saw of Blaine when they were alone, the more he ached for that side of Blaine to be able to come out all the time. Around others, Blaine seemed almost standoffish and fake in comparison to the boy he saw when they were alone in his dorm - sweet to the point of corniness, increasingly expressive and eager, with the most adorable uncertain smile who would look at Kurt like he was something incredible. He had been drawn in by the Blaine everyone on-campus regarded with respect, but it was this other Blaine he really adored.

When they got to New York, he assured himself with a frisson of excitement at the thought. It was a defense mechanism because no one else was accepting of people like them yet, not in Ohio. But once they found a safe place, that was who Blaine could be all the time.

He hadn't thought the fantasy could get any better, but with that addition - and Blaine's eagerness to hear about it a few days earlier - it was.

By sheer coincidence, the movie for the night was "On the Town." To be entirely honest, the drive-in could have been playing "Jet Pilot" and he would have come here; that the film was one all three of them would actually enjoy was simply a perk. It didn't escape Kurt's notice that, while Blaine still insisted on parking in the last row, he didn't look nearly as nervous as he had last time. It was progress, and he would take it gladly. 

"While I have to admit I was skeptical about this place - the road out here does have a kind of ax-murderer feel to it - it's surprisingly well-populated," Rachel said, shrugging out of her jacket in the back seat. 

"It's not exactly the one in Lima, but there are advantages to that," Kurt replied. While Rachel was apparently more knowledgeable than most on the subject, he wasn't about to be the one to point out to her that there were few if any young women milling around in the lot or at the snack bar. She would likely figure it out on her own anyway; to him it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.

"Should we switch seats now?" she asked, and Blaine turned to look back at her.

"Why?" he asked, glancing at Kurt with confusion as if to ask 'what is she talking about?'

"Well, if I'm your chaperon," she said with an exaggerated wink, "then I assumed you would want free reign of the back seat. Don't worry, I won't look in the rearview mirror," she added with a grin that made Kurt want to roll his eyes. He managed to, by some miracle, restrain himself.

"We're not necking in front of you, Rachel," Kurt replied evenly. Blaine looked panicked, as though he wasn't sure whether to toss Rachel from the car and speed off or hop out himself and begin running as far as humanly possible from this place. 

"Behind me, technically," she replied.

"No."

"What else do people do on a date?" she asked. "Not that I have much experience."

"Neither do I, but so far there's a lot of watching the movie and not necking in the backseat," Kurt replied with a look that told her to drop it. Blaine seemed uncomfortable, and if Rachel caused what progress there had been to vanish, so help him-

"A lot of dinners," Blaine said almost out of the blue, and both turned to look at him. "Most of the Warblers don't really know how to interact with girls so they spend the whole night over by the jukebox while the girls sit at the table and talk about how irritating it is, which is probably why only a few of them have girlfriends."

"That does not surprise me," Kurt stated. "Seriously, I need to set up a dating-etiquette school. I've been on exactly one real date and even I know better than that. Honestly."

"But if you can't go to dinner..." Rachel said slowly, as though she wasn't sure if she could say such a thing. When neither burst in to contradict her, she continued, "...what do you do? If you don't go out and you don't make out in the backseat, what are two boys supposed to do?"

There was silence for a moment. It was a question Kurt honestly didn't have an answer to, even as hard as he'd been trying to come up with one, and when he looked to Blaine for suggestions he found the boy staring very intently at the top of the dashboard. "So," he said brightly, clapping his hands together as he changed the subject. "Who wants popcorn? It may mean an extra half hour on my nightly skincare regimen to counteract the butter and grease, but even I can say it's not really a movie without snacks."

"You didn't answer," Rachel pointed out.

"You're right, I didn't."

"Why not?" Blaine asked, looking at him.

Kurt's eyes narrowed, not sure he understood. "Why do you suddenly want to continue this conversation?"

"Because I have no idea what we're supposed to do next and was hoping you did."

The openness, the frankness of Blaine's admission of ignorance, took him by surprise, but he concealed it well for the most part. "She's the one who has a father with a lover and a house," he pointed out, nodding in Rachel's direction.

"I only see them a couple times a year. Should I set up another dinner?"

Kurt couldn't deny the little surge of joy at the idea, but he noticed Blaine looked nervous. While he couldn't be sure, he guessed it was probably at the idea of anyone else - even others like them - knowing about him. But it was just because he didn't understand yet. Once he met Hiram and Leroy (especially Leroy...though on second thought, he might relate more to Hiram), Blaine would get it. "Maybe," he replied noncommittally. "Care to get some refreshments?" he added, not taking his eyes off Blaine even though he was clearly talking to Rachel.

"Sure."

"Okay." When she didn't move, he added, "Would you give us a minute?"

"What? Oh!" She grinned and gave another wink, which Kurt was starting to think was either creepy or a sign of a latent severe eye disorder, then clambered out of the car and headed toward the concession stand, her skirt like a beacon even in the low light of the drive-in. 

Honestly. He was starting to wonder if he would have a worse reputation for dating someone who dressed like that than he would for dating Blaine. All attempts to help fix her wardrobe were proving fruitless, in no small part because she insisted it would be too obvious if her date helped her dress first. He tried to get rid of offensive items as he found them, but sometimes there were just too many to count, and no matter how many suggestions and how much coaching he gave on the phone before an evening out, she managed to select the worst things. Tonight's skirt was white with pink lace and a pink shirt with puffy sleeves. Did she try to dress like a child on her way to First Communion class?

"Are you okay?" Kurt asked quietly once she was out of the car.

"What? Oh - yeah," Blaine replied quickly. "It's just..."

"...strange having someone else on our date with us?" he asked with a faint smile. "Believe me, I know. I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you. It's just easier sometimes to work in the direction of what she wants - this should buy us the next few weekends. Either that or she'll think she gets to come on every date, I'm still figuring it out." Blaine laughed softly at that, which Kurt considered a victory. After a moment's silence as neither was sure what to say, he added, "You should really meet her father. It helped a lot, seeing..." he stared out the front windshield again as he trailed off. "Even though they can't be open with the rest of the world, they have a home and a life. It's like this. Or like in your room."

Blaine nodded a little. "That might be good," he agreed. "I don't know how to adapt any of the traditional hallmarks to our...situation."

"Why do they have to?" Kurt asked. "Who cares? I mean, for one thing, a lot of them don't fit. All rules of chivalry, let alone dance and about two thirds of etiquette rules, are based on a man doing one thing and a woman doing another."

What he wasn't saying was that he wanted them to fit. He wanted things to be able to fit into the categories almost as much as Blaine did, probably - for one thing, all of those were necessary for parties, and he certainly wanted those. For another, it felt...he wasn't sure how to put words to it, and if he did he wasn't sure Blaine was ready for that conversation. Instead he stared out as he watched the other men stare at each other. A man leaned against the hood of his car, arms crossed. A man walked past on his way from his car to the restrooms and stared at the car-leaner as he passed, which seemed odd - while the man looked oddly casually leaning there, the movie hadn't started yet and it was a nice night. Another man passed and, again, stared; this time the staring was mutual and intense. It looked like Puckerman versus one of the other jocks, which meant no doubt someone was going to throw a punch.

No violence came; instead the man with the car gave a quick jerk of a nod, pushed himself up in a smooth motion, and followed the starer.

"Here we go," Rachel announced brightly as she opened the car door and attempted to climb in without spilling her bounty. "What did I miss?"

"Nothing," they replied, and Blaine did his best to flash her a smile as he took the pop she offered him.

* * * * *

"I can't wait to be there," Rachel sighed dreamily as they stared at the images of New York on the screen. She rested her chin on the top of the passenger seat.

"Me neither," Kurt replied, having slid across the bench seat to be closer to Blaine. Their hands weren't intertwined, but they were touching almost constantly which Kurt could accept as a reasonable substitute - for now. At mention of being in New York, he flashed Blaine a grin.

"I have it all planned out already. I've been going through my mom's guidebook from when she visited in the hopes of becoming a Broadway star...before ultimately returning to marry my dad."

Kurt turned to shoot her a look. "Better check your musicals again. Your mother's pre-war guidebook will do you about as much good as Chip's grandfather's did. Does it even have the Museum of Modern Art? Everything changes fast there. I'll bet most of the buildings in this movie aren't even the same anymore, and it's only a decade old." He loved that idea - the constant reinvention of it all. It was the only place in the world where the city changed as fast as the fashion, and it was thrilling to think of living somewhere so dynamic - unlike their never-changing cow town where the only progress came by judicial fiat. Progress could be made so quickly in a place like that, in so many ways.

It was perfect.

"We'll just have to rely on Blaine, since he'll be there a year early," he stated. "He can be our Hildy. Only in better clothes and without that hat."

Blaine hesitated a moment. On one hand, he still wasn't as sold on the idea as Kurt was. But he did make it sound so good, and the movie made the city look like such a great place to lose one's self for a day, that he had a hard time saying no. "Deal," he replied, and Kurt beamed. "Then you can...Come up to my place," he sang quietly near Kurt's ear.

Kurt's eyes widened and his smile faded into something more caught off-guard than purely pleased. "Sounds perfect," he said on a sigh, more air than sound.

It did, Blaine could agree. Maybe. 

* * * * *

Though he was breaking every rule he'd been taught, indulging in all sorts of things he'd believed were signs of absolute mental decay and depravity, and falling in love with a boy who seemed to want him to proudly announce just how little control over himself he had when it came to giving in to his desires, Blaine did have to give himself credit for one thing:

It took an inordinate amount of self-control to lie above Kurt like this, pressed against him from mid-torso to feet as he slowly kissed the soft, perfectly-white skin of the boy's neck, and not give in completely. Especially with the soft, pleasured sounds Kurt made when he did it.

It felt too good, touching Kurt. Sometimes Blaine genuinely felt like it was an addiction - he would see Kurt across the room and want to walk over just to have an excuse to be close to him even if there were a hundred people around. If they were next to each other on the sofa in the Commons, all he could think of was the lack of distance between them and how desperately he wanted to take Kurt's hand or kiss his neck or run his fingers through Kurt's hair.

And that was all far more appropriate than a lot of his thoughts.

The dreams were back with a vengeance and left him waking with a strange sense of curiosity, pleasure, and nausea, as though he couldn't decide whether they were amazing or still the source of anguish. Even though he had stopped resisting how he felt for Kurt, there was still an element of danger to them. After all, when he'd left Kurt like that-...it was a dream-fueled haze of desire and unrestrained lust (God, even the word felt disgusting). But this...lying here with him and feeling so many of the same wants creeping in - a little less frantic but no less urgent - felt so different. 

And if the dreams weren't a sign of being crazy...was there any reason to hate them other than the lingering reaction left from five years of trying unsuccessfully to banish them and be normal?

And from what he could gather from the other boys at school, desires like this cropping up during extended necking sessions with the person you were dating was neither unusual nor problematic...except when the girl got upset because it was pushing too far and therefore insulting to her virtue or something - he wasn't sure he really understood that part. Kurt didn't seem to be having that problem in any event, if the soft moans or the way his arms and hands tightened around Blaine's shoulders and in the back of his hair were any indication.

"Blaine?"

"Mm?" he mumbled against Kurt's neck. He smelled sweeter at this distance than he did sitting side-by-side, and Blaine wondered if it was because he could smell more of Kurt's skin than of all the products and aftershave and cologne. With how soft it was and all the care Kurt took with his skin, it wouldn't have surprised him if his skin really did smell like that now.

"I, um."

At Kurt's hesitance, Blaine pulled back quickly. "What? I'm sorry, did I-...was that too-"

"No," Kurt assured him. "No, that was fine. I just...I need to tell you something."

Those words, as it turned out, felt dangerous no matter who a person was dating. "Okay," he said slowly, sitting back. He tried to hide his nervousness by adjusting his shirt collar, but it ended up making him feel more fidgety.

"I wasn't being entirely honest earlier," Kurt admitted quietly. "I do care."

He tried to search his memory for what conversations they'd had where Kurt had said he didn't care about something and was coming up empty. "What do you mean?"

"At the movie last night, when we were talking about the fact that rules don't apply to us the same way, that we don't know how to adapt them to our..."

"Yeah," Blaine nodded, remembering the conversation.

"I said that I didn't care, but I do. I know it's silly, I know trying to cobble together some semblance of ritual probably seems ridiculous in light of how many rules we're breaking that I honestly don't care about. But there's something about them that makes everything feel so much more normal. Like even though we're not like them, we still are. It makes this feel like something special instead of like we're just best friends. Not that I don't value our friendship-" Kurt amended quickly, reaching out to grab Blaine's hand. "Because I do. I guess I just need to know this is...different."

Of course it was different. Friendships didn't have six months of anguish attached to them because friendships weren't a sign of mental illness - the lack of friendships sometimes were, or a mistaken belief that friendships existed with creatures that didn't exist or something along those lines, hallucination of friends and the like, but friendships among boys were completely acceptable. If this were just friendship, they could be open about who they were to one another and go to movies together and go to dinner in public and no one would think otherwise.

Nothing about their relationship was remotely like a friendship except inasmuch as they were also friends. At least, he thought they were. He told Kurt more than he'd told any of his previous friends, and he sought him out the way Wes sought out David when there was a problem. Maybe that was just an inherent part of relationships such as these, though, he wasn't really sure.

Instead he offered, "Well, I don't do any of this with friends." He paused a moment then joked, "Don't tell me you do."

Kurt shot him a look. "My friends are girls, I should hope not."

"Then...?" When Kurt didn't explain further, he added, "I"m not sure I understand what you're looking for, Kurt. I...you know the rules we have to-"

"Oh, I do," Kurt assured him. "I'm not necessarily trying to pull you further out of your comfort zone, either, even though I don't think it would kill you nearly as much as you seem to think. I guess I just want...part of that. The rituals. The rites of passage - there are stages of relationships for heterosexuals. There are ways to tell when a boy and a girl go from flirtation to dating, then steadies. There are dances and dates and the girl wearing the boy's ring. Why shouldn't we get that? Why shouldn't we be allowed to be like them?"

"You know why," Blaine pointed out quietly.

"I do know why," Kurt replied. "It doesn't mean I like it. It doesn't mean it's fair. Why shouldn't I be able to wear your ring?"

"For one thing, I don't have one," Blaine pointed out. "Dalton doesn't do them."

Kurt's eyes lit up. "No," he said slowly. "But there is something Dalton does do." When Blaine had no idea what Kurt was talking about, he explained, "Pins."

"Pins?"

"At college, that's what the boys do instead of class rings - they give girls their fraternity pins, right? We have pins."

"Kurt, I can't just give you my pin - it's part of the required uniform for competition and certain other events-"

"I can give you mine," Kurt replied. His eyes shone eagerly in a way that always made Blaine want to give Kurt whatever he was asking for, but he still didn't understand.

"What would be the point in that? They look exactly the same."

"Which is why it's perfect," Kurt stated excitedly. "While yes, a girl getting a ring or a pin from a boy tells the world they're going steady, obviously you wouldn't be comfortable with that. But no one would have to know...except us." Kurt sat up on his knees, almost bouncing as he talked about the plan he obviously thought was brilliant. "We would know," he added, his voice a little more serious as he met Blaine's eyes.

He still wasn't sure he understood why it was so important to Kurt, but it was obvious that it was. And he did have a point - no one in the Warblers would be able to tell the difference between their two pins, even if his did look a bit duller from years of wear. There wasn't enough difference for anyone to notice, let alone comment on or draw a conclusion from. But it was still a gesture, and they would know about it. He would know that was Kurt's pin on his jacket, that his pin was on Kurt's, and that it meant something.

Kurt was right - it did feel refreshingly normal.

He nodded a little. " Bring yours next time you come up here," he requested, and Kurt positively beamed before leaning in to kiss him hard, fingers tangling in the back of his hair again. After a few awkward moments of trying to get Kurt's legs out from under him and both of them shifted back to being in line with the bed, he settled over Kurt again, a warmth settling over him as he felt Kurt's cheek nuzzle just under his jaw and up along the side of his neck.

Kurt knew how crazy that drove him, even if no one else would ever know. That meant something, too.


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is rated NC-17.

With less than a week left before Regionals, Kurt was once again struck by just how different Dalton was from McKinley. About this time at his old school, all hell would be breaking loose: Mr. Schuester would be trying to spread the wealth of solos while still giving them the best chance to win, which almost always meant trying to justify why Rachel and Finn got yet another duet. Rachel would be choosing that moment to fall for him for the umpteenth time, which meant that Quinn would spend the week berating Finn and threatening to quit if Rachel got to sing more duets with him - spurred on by Sandy, of course, who was gunning for solos herself. Meanwhile Puck would be in the background grumbling about how no one ever let him sing, either, and Brittany would stare blankly at the new music as though trying to figure out how in the world there could be more words to learn. The fighting would come to a head either two days before the competition or - in the case of the disastrous Sophomore year Regionals - on the bus ride on the way to the competition.   
  
The Warblers were in fine form themselves.  
  
"I think Blaine's version might just be better than the original."  
  
"Yes, but it's not in his natural key," David replied, talking around Wes to correct Thad before glancing back out at the rest of the group. "We can rearrange it - if we bring it up a third, it might be easier."  
  
Blaine sat in a chair facing the Council, the other Warblers gathered around on the couches. He shook his head and replied, "There's no reason to rearrange the entire song and make everyone relearn the harmonies in a different key less than a week before competition. At that point we would be better off learning something new entirely."  
  
"I agree," Thad jumped in. "We should just let you sing what you want to sing."  
  
Apparently, in this strange alternate universe that was Dalton Academy, where everyone sang together and respected each other, the only fights before competition were fights over who could fawn over Blaine the most. Even Kurt, who could certainly appreciate Blaine's talent, and found himself daydreaming about how attractive Blaine was when he sang, thought it was a bit much. Blaine Anderson: Great singer, or best singer ever? could still get old quickly.  
  
He glanced over and caught Blaine's eye. He looked bored of it all, Kurt concluded, like he didn't really want to hear any of it anyway. If this was intended as an attempt to boost Blaine's ego, it clearly wasn't working; if anything, he seemed tired of the conversation.  
  
"Unless you think I'm not hitting the notes, I don't see any reason to do that," Blaine stated. He didn't think he'd been screwing any of it up, but on the off chance that they were hearing something he wasn't then by all means he could change something - he did want to give them the best chance, after all.  
  
"I certainly wouldn't say that," Wes interjected.  
  
"You sound perfect," Thad stated with an eager smile.  
  
That was the problem, wasn't it? They sounded perfect - they always did. The Warblers prided themselves on technical excellence, which was a hallmark of their type of a capella groups. Hitting the wrong note in a full choir with a hundred other people singing was barely noticeable, but hitting a wrong note with only a dozen or so other singers, everyone on a different line, with no instruments to cover it up - the stakes were higher.  
  
The stakes were always higher, it seemed.  
  
But that would never make them the best.  
  
"May I say something?" he asked, and the three Councilmembers looked at one another in surprise.  
  
"Of course," Wes stated after a moment, looking him over as he tried to determine what Blaine might be up to. "The Council recognizes Senior Warbler Blaine Anderson."  
  
Blaine nodded and stood to address the group. "Thank you. First, I would like to say what a privilege it has been to lead all of you in these wonderful songs this year. I appreciate the level of trust you have placed in me as lead vocalist, and that's not something I take lightly. Which is why I have to say..." he hesitated. Should he even be saying this? Could any good possibly come of it?  
  
Too late now, he realized with every eye on him. He couldn't very well back down now.   
  
"No solo you can give me with be enough to win the competition on Saturday." There was an outburst of confusion, frustration, near-anger from a few, but Blaine continued quickly. "Our technical abilities are beyond compare, the arrangements are fantastic, and all of us have been working to perfect our parts. But I think that might be part of the problem."  
  
"How dare you?" one of them - it sounded like Trent - demanded at the same time David added, "So you're saying we're  _too_ perfect?"  
  
"I'm saying that we spend all our time trying to get things so right that we forget what music is meant to be," he stated, trying to convey something that seemed like an impossible feeling to describe. "Music is about being able to move people in a way that ordinary words can't, it's about emotion and raw passion. When we sing it's like we're- porcelain birds swaying on a windchime. We hit the same notes every time, but it's mathematical, it's not  _musical_. Think about any great singer, any performer you want to emulate - they always have that spark." Judy Garland without emotion would be-...well, she'd be Shirley Temple, and nobody went to see her at the Grove Theater or Carnegie Hall, did they?  
  
He looked around at his fellow Warblers and his eyes landed on Kurt. He could tell from the look that Kurt knew exactly who he was thinking about - they had spent more than enough afternoons listening to her in his room, after all - but Kurt also seemed confused. He stared up with narrowed eyes and a tight, perplexed expression.  
  
He wished he could explain it. He wished he could at least say it in a way that Kurt could understand, because if anyone would get what he was trying to say-  
  
If anyone understood that sometimes it was more important to feel than to be perfect, surely it had to be Kurt.  
  
"Think about Lima Independent High School performing at Sectionals. They had an incredible technical ability, and their vocals were fantastic but they were flat. Dull. Lifeless. The second number had no personality at all, just a series of accurate notes in complex chords. But think about the first number they did - the girl and boy dancing together. Her voice was far less technically impressive but it was fantastic anyway. You could tell exactly what that girl was feeling, and she made the audience feel it, too. She had such spirit when she sang...if the rest of the group had that, they would have beaten us. I know that's going to be our undoing on Saturday, too."  
  
In the midst of the eruption of indignant interjections from the rest of the Warblers, Kurt's hand shot up. "If I may?"  
  
Wes banged his gavel twice on the table in rapid succession while declaring "Order!" and the room's noise level reduced to a disgruntled rumble.  
  
Kurt smiled and stood, nearly eye-to-eye with Blaine and much closer than he had realized before. The instinct to touch him in support and fondness and really just because he was  _there_  was nearly overwhelming, but he clasped his hands in front of himself and stated, "I believe that Blaine is absolutely right. When I was in my old glee club, this was the time of the competition cycle where we would be fighting like crazy. Cats and dogs had nothing on us. Everyone wanting solos, everyone wanting someone else to not get solos, everyone worried about their boyfriend or girlfriend singing with someone else- though I suppose that isn't an issue here..." he trailed off, purposely avoiding Blaine's eyes lest he say something stupid. Joking was a nervous habit of his, and often when he was most nervous was when it became the least appropriate. "But it was because we had so much desire to perform. I've seen the Warblers perform showstopping numbers - the first time I set foot on campus, it was...a treat to watch you all. But lately I think we get so caught up in being precise that we don't always remember to enjoy it." He sat down and shot Blaine a look that said 'I tried, at least' and Blaine gave a faint smile.  
  
Wes nodded thoughtfully. "Warbler Blaine, what do you propose instead?"  
  
This was the harder part, Blaine realized as the words suddenly left the tip of his tongue. He knew what he wanted to say, and he knew what would get the end result he wanted, and he knew what would bring out his most passionate performance, but he couldn't  _say_  any of those things. "I would propose a new song in place of 'Can't Take My Eyes Off of You.' A duet," he stated, trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible. "Someone to play off of, to draw out each other's emotions."  
  
David looked murderous. Thad looked confused. But Wes looked thoughtful for a moment before saying, "All right. A vote, then. All those in favour of a dual lead at Regionals."  
  
Blaine glanced around with barely-covered nervousness as he watched the hands slowly raise. It looked as though some of them still weren't sure why he was doing this, but at the very least they trusted him. He smiled as Wes counted the votes, as it was clear that his proposal had been accepted. Now he just had to get the second part into place.  
  
"Now, for the audition list-"  
  
"No," he stated, and David's eyes widened as he paused, pen held just over the official minutes. "No auditions. I would like to do the number...with Kurt."  
  
Kurt's head jerked up so quickly that, had he kept hits wits about him better, he would have been embarrassed by how spastic it looked. Blaine  _wanted_  to do a duet with him? After last time, that seemed like it could only end in disaster.  
  
Except so much about Blaine had  _changed_  recently. He wasn't the same boy he'd been in February, he was different - more secure. More confident. More ready to accept who he was. More ready to acknowledge him in private, at the very least, which hadn't always been the case. Maybe this really was something fantastic in the making.  
  
"I- I couldn't, there are so many talented voices here, I wouldn't want to-" he protested, unable to take his eyes off Blaine for more than a split second.  
  
Blaine flashed a warm smile and rolled his eyes as if to say 'Don't you want to sing with me, silly?' before adding, for the group's benefit, "After his exceptional solo at the Showcase, I believe Kurt has more than earned a duet."  
  
"I-"  
  
"All those in favour of Kurt being my duet partner for Regionals," Blaine called for the vote. Almost every hand went up.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt wasn't sure when he started being able to feel Blaine enter a room, but as he sat in the Commons and tried to focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald he swore he knew Blaine was there as soon as he heard the doors open. Maybe he'd memorized the pattern of his steps in those boring loafers. Maybe he could smell his aftershave, though it was unlikely at this distance; rather, he swore he could smell it but suspected it might be a Pavlovian response. In either event, he wasn't surprised when he heard Blaine offer a quiet, "Hey." There was a smile in his tone, and when Kurt glanced up he saw the matching one on Blaine's face - sweet, private, genuine, like it usually was when they were alone. There was the smile everyone else got to see, the confident 'Look at me, I'm practically Elvis and everyone wants to be my friend' one that went with the swagger and the status at Lead Warbler Vocalist...and then there was this one. Kurt didn't have to think for a moment to decide which one he liked better.  
  
"Hello," he replied with a smile of his own.  
  
"Are you busy?"  
  
Kurt glanced at his book, then back up at Blaine. He was supposed to be finishing the text and starting his essay, but all he could process was the fact that in no universe would Gatsby want to be with Daisy. And clearly Nick was interested in Gatsby, too - just look at the way he was described. No heterosexual had that much preoccupation with another gentleman's clothing. "Desperate not to be, actually."  
  
"Great. I found the perfect song for Regionals and was hoping we could practice."  
  
"Do tell." Kurt had to admit he was surprised by Blaine's choice. It wasn't anything like the usual Warbler fare. "I'm impressed," he said as Blaine gave him a hesitant smile, as though checking for his approval. "You're usually so Billboard Hot 100."  
  
"Well, I did say I wanted something more emotional," he offered nervously.  
  
"This will be," Kurt confirmed, then hesitated. "Are you sure you want to do this?"  
  
"What? Don't you think we'll sound good?"  
  
He thought they would sound amazing, but that wasn't what he was worried about. He was worried about what happened when Blaine realized what the lyrics were kind of talking about - or how they could be construed. Or what the real message of the song was. "Of course. I'm just a little concerned this might be... _too_  emotional," he offered euphemistically. "I'm surprised you chose it is all."  
  
"You know I love Broadway - and this show in particular."  
  
"I do know that." They had only talked about the show a few thousand times. "But I also know that it's potentially revealing and a little more controversial than you would ordinarily want to be associated with."  
  
It was, Blaine had to admit, but that was almost what made it more important. It was about them. It was about New York (ironically enough, all things considered). It was about wanting to believe in what Kurt believed in so genuinely. After all, if there was one way he had always been able to convince himself of something, it was by acting it out for long enough. And what better way to act things out than through song?   
  
If he sang it hard enough, long enough, with Kurt up there with him to genuinely believe it, then maybe...maybe he could start really believing in it, too.  
  
"I think it will be great," he stated with more confidence than he felt. "I think  _we'll_  be great." He drew in a deep breath and with a little brighter smile added, "I have the arrangement all worked out if you want to work on it."  
  
Kurt closed his book and slipped it into his bag. "Sounds great."  
  
Blaine opened his notebook and kicked himself. He brought everything else except that sheet music? "It's in my room," he stated looking sheepish. He thought for a moment about running to get it and coming back, but realized there was another option. One he almost liked better. "We could practice up there," he suggested.   
  
If the point was to channel emotion and depth and passion, that did make sense, didn't it? Where else could he be vulnerable enough to tap into those things instead of just acting out how he thought they might look? Where else could he let his concerns about perfection drop just long enough to create something real and beautiful?  
  
What else was the song about, anyway?  
  
Kurt looked at him with a bit of a knowing smirk as he stood with an exaggerated sway. "With the album - since we don't have a 16-piece band of boys to back us up," he said in a voice that made very clear he doubted that was the real motivation.  
  
"Sure," Blaine replied.  
  
Kurt smiled and slipped his bag over his shoulder and followed Blaine out of the Commons. He wasn't sure when exactly Blaine had started holding doors open for him when he passed - he wanted to say it was after they'd exchanged pins, but he couldn't be sure. It was new, at any rate, and chivalrous without being patronizing, and he found he liked it a great deal. It made him think of regal movie star courtships for some reason though every man well-mannered enough to know not to eat dinner with his hands knew to hold open doors...  
  
...for ladies. There was that downside, but it didn't feel that way with Blaine. It felt respectful instead of feminizing. Rather than try to thank Blaine or explain to him why he enjoyed it, he simply smiled as he passed the threshold.  
  
The downside to practicing in Blaine's room became clear almost immediately. In public it was difficult enough to pretend not to want to touch Blaine all the time, to kiss him just because he was close enough to...when they were alone in his room, where no one could see them and there was no reason to stop except the vague knowledge that there was work that needed to be done, the herculean task of getting something accomplished became nearly impossible.  
  
And that was before Blaine started singing.  
  
Kurt wasn't sure how to describe what about Blaine looked different during this song than during any other, but there was definitely something there. Instead of the usual faux-confidence, with its bright, toothy smile and strong gestures that vaguely acted out the lyrics, punctuating the rhythmic sections, Blaine wore a more hesitant expression. His smile was almost shy, private, just a bit sly as though he knew that only he and Kurt knew what he was really singing about.  
  
It was about finding somewhere they could ignore the rest of the world and just be themselves. About New York. About their future.  
  
About Blaine's dorm room, the little safe haven where Kurt could wax poetic about the life they would have together. Where they could exchange pins and know that they were the only people in the universe who knew the difference. Where they could kiss each other without fear because no one could catch them. Where Blaine could let the confident, perfect exterior drop and give him those sweet, adoring looks that made Kurt blush and feel like the luckiest boy in the world because this amazing guy thought  _he_  was worth noticing.  
  
It was about being safe no matter what the rest of the world thought about them. About being understood, if only by each other.  
  
Blaine's eyes were full of earnestness, as though he was pinning every bit of his hopes and dreams on the song being right. After all, if the song was right, then that meant he couldn't be 'wrong.' If the song was right, then they could be together like this - somewhere, someday. If the song was right...  
  
Kurt couldn't help himself, reaching over to run his hand slowly up and down Blaine's arm as he sang in reassurance. He knew that was out there for them, he knew it for sure. After all, Leroy had told him: just find a place where there are others. Find somewhere they could be themselves, that they could find other people, and they would be safe there. And New York had to be one of those places, he just knew it. Between the sailors, and people who liked everything he liked - because if he and Blaine were the only boys he had ever known who liked musicals this much, then surely the men who  _made_  musicals had to be like them, too. They had to be sexual inverses like he was. And the men in fashion - Christian Dior? Pierre Balman? Unless there was something fundamentally different about Europeans (which he had long wondered), then maybe they were like them, too. So a city where men such as them were respected and regarded as the visionaries they were, then that meant there had to be other homosexuals there.  
  
There had to be. If they were going to survive anywhere, it would be there, and he wasn't about to consider the alternatives.  
  
Blaine grinned, meeting Kurt's eyes as he sang, and reached over to run his thumb along Kurt's cheek. Kurt's eyes fluttered closed as he picked up his part of the verse, his hand sliding down Blaine's arm to clasp his other hand. He felt Blaine's lightly-calloused thumb trace the line of his jaw then slowly up over his bottom lip, and found himself unable to concentrate on the lyrics. He knew them by heart, he'd had them memorized for at least a year or two, but for some reason with this boy so close-  
  
His eyes flew open as he tried to fumble for the sheet music with his free hand, and he found himself staring into Blaine's eyes. They were more dark gold than brown at this distance, almost the colour of the bronze sculptures in the main building, framed by long, thick eyelashes that Kurt had somehow managed to not really notice before, with an intensity that left Kurt breathless.  
  
They'd kissed a hundred times already, why did everything feel so much more heightened? he wondered as he tried to force himself to remember to inhale, breath quivering a little. Usually everything was either sweet and lazy but casual - the afternoons spent kissing on Blaine's bed where it felt like hours passed and the only sign it had been longer than a few minutes was how sore and swollen his lips were - or hard and fast and intense where there wasn't any time to notice little details because things like the way Blaine's eyes changed colour were overridden by the hot influx of sudden sensations that left him dizzy. The moment, with the intense staring and slow-motion feel, was new and a little terrifying in its exposure. It was like if Blaine kept staring for a few more seconds he could see  _through_  Kurt and that-  
  
He shivered slightly as Blaine's thumb moved from the plumpest part of his lip down to cup his chin, tilting his head down just enough for the intense kiss that followed. Kurt gripped Blaine's hand harder and moved his other hand up to clutch at Blaine's shoulder. He felt weak in the knees, as though he might collapse forward into Blaine at any moment, and a soft moan of surprise escaped. Blaine's hand disentangled from his and Kurt felt a steadying arm wrap around his back, pulling him closer. Kurt reached up to cup Blaine's cheek as he finally found his bearings and felt steady enough to return the kiss, reveling in the sort of loving neediness.  
  
Things had felt needy between them before - that time Kurt didn't want to think about in the Commons, for one. But this felt different. Blaine wasn't practically ripping his clothes off and trying to devour his face in some pent-up desperation, it was...It was the difference between wolfing down a meal because he hadn't eaten all day, and eating it quickly because it tasted too good to resist.  
  
What the hell was that metaphor supposed to be, anyway? Apparently attending a school full of teenage boys was rubbing off on him in unexpected ways.  
  
He knew logically he should step back. Anything leaving him reeling this much when it had barely begun was sure to end in disaster...and a few weeks ago, he would have. A few weeks ago, he would have told Blaine gently but firmly that they should stop because he wasn't ready to go through any of that again, and that as much he enjoyed being boyfriends and as much as he loved Blaine, the intensity was scaring him. A few weeks ago, he would have stepped back from Blaine before Blaine could bolt out the door.  
  
But things were different now. Blaine had  _chosen him_  to sing a duet with. He had actively sought him out instead of last time when they were thrown together as a consequence of Sam's desire to thank him for helping. Blaine had voluntarily chosen to be in the same room with him when they sang instead of trying to do everything he could to get away from him. And then he had invited him up to the dorm room where they both knew what tended to happen, and when they both knew they would be singing and that neither of them could resist the other when they sang.   
  
Blaine had made the first move. That meant he wasn't making up any of this in his head. It meant he wasn't imagining some relationship that wasn't there. It was like when Blaine had kissed him at the drive-in: it meant he was on-board. It meant he was in this and not just skirting around the edges. Scared or not, slowly evolving to the point where he didn't consider himself sick as though he was, it was still progress.  
  
And it was  _huge_.  
  
And it meant there was no way he could step back. Not when Blaine had picked a song to sing about their future together for crying out loud. Not when Blaine kissed him like he loved him more than he needed to breathe.  
  
Blaine pulled back barely a few inches, arm still tightly around Kurt's waist, and stared into his eyes. Was he supposed to be doing this? Blaine wondered. After they-...was it really right to-...after last time, he wouldn't have blamed Kurt for never speaking to him again, and now he was heading down the exact same path again. It was all so fast, and he could feel the frantic need building in him - the one that made him feel like if he didn't go back to kissing Kurt  _right this second_  he might die.   
  
He hated that feeling. That feeling that still seemed wrong no matter what Kurt tried to tell him, if only because it was that kind of unrelenting hedonistic urge that had made him hurt this amazing, gorgeous boy whose fingers were digging into his shoulder in an attempt to stand upright. That need, that desperate need that never seemed to go away entirely but was now taking over in such a way that he swore his body might start moving on its own any second now, was the opposite of everything he tried to be.   
  
Dreams were one thing, and he was learning to slowly not feel inherently disturbed by those. But this was dangerous.   
  
He tried to speak, to ask Kurt-...he wasn't sure what. To go away so he wouldn't maul the counter-tenor? To give him a minute? Whether they should be doing this now? Whether they should do it at all? Kurt drew in a breath, glasz eyes shining and just the slightest bit unfocused as though he were living halfway between reality and some dream-like state, and nodded - a tiny movement of his head that conveyed nothing but eagerness.  
  
Blaine swallowed hard and nudged Kurt gently in the direction of the bed. At the very least it would keep him from falling down.  
  
Kurt scooted awkwardly backwards onto the bed, shimmying up toward the pillow in an uncoordinated mess of flailing limbs, then looked up at Blaine expectantly with just a hint of nervousness. The way he practically laid himself out for the taking in that position- Blaine moved hurriedly onto the bed, toeing off his shoes on the way, and covered Kurt's body with his own. The blissful sigh Kurt released at the contact sent a hot jolt through him and he shifted uncomfortably as his pants started to feel a little too tight; the shifting only exacerbated his problem, and he couldn't help but let out a soft groan at the sensation.  
  
Kurt's tie was the first thing to go, tossed in the general direction of the desk chair, and while he was certain he would be reprimanded for improper care of garments later, Blaine didn't care. He set to work on the button of Kurt's collar and let out a bitten-off groan as Kurt pressed up underneath him. He glanced at the boy and saw an uncertain but eager look, as though Kurt were asking, "Did I do that right?"  
  
Rather than bothering with words, he leaned in to lick a stripe along the underside of Kurt's jaw, smirking as he squirmed - and with every wriggly motion came more friction that left them both moaning. He placed a hot, open-mouthed kiss just below Kurt's ear, and when that earned him a gasp he began to lick and suck at the spot. Kurt's fingers clenched against his shoulders as his head fell back against the pillow, exposing an expanse of his neck Blaine hadn't even considered before.  
  
There were just so many places he wanted to touch and taste and experiment with in ways he couldn't fully understand. He was hardly an expert, he didn't know exactly what he was doing or why he thought things like 'sucking on Kurt's neck might be fun', but somehow...maybe he'd picked up more than he thought from pretending to listen to the other guys in the dining hall when they talked about their weekends.  
  
Most of it, though, was from Kurt's reactions. He shouldn't have been surprised how responsive and downright  _expressive_  he was - in no small part because they had done things before. Even though he didn't want to think about his actions afterwards, eh couldn't deny that he had seen this side of Kurt before...but that had been so hurried and frantic that he honestly didn't remember quite a bit of it. This was slower and he found himself more able to pay attention to details, like the precise place on Kurt's neck that made his mouth drop open and the incredible sound that poured forth when it did.  
  
He rocked slowly against Kurt as he peeled back the collar of his shirt, moaning against his collarbone at the friction it caused. Kurt's keening whimpers were near-constant, occasionally getting louder and higher and nearing a wail as Blaine explored his neck with his mouth and tongue.   
  
The third button, located mid-chest, was easier to pop open though Blaine wasn't sure whether it was because of practice or positioning, and the fourth easier still. As he tried to kiss his way down, Kurt squirmed and pulled away with a flail. "What's wrong?" he asked. Kurt mumbled something, rolling his eyes, and looking like he wanted to hide. "Kurt-"  
  
"Ticklish," he repeated more loudly. He looked embarrassed about it, more than any person should have been over something so inane, though Blaine did suppose it probably didn't fit with the together image Kurt liked to maintain...and did potentially make him vulnerable if that sort of information fell into the wrong hands at an all-boys' school with a reputation for friendly teasing.   
  
"I won't tell," Blaine replied playfully as he unbuttoned the last button, admiring Kurt's torso as the shirt fell open. He was slim but not scrawny, lithe almost, with a fine dusting of hair over his chest and stomach - not very much at all, really, just enough to not look like a child.  
  
Or like a girl.  
  
Kurt shifted self-consciously under the scrutiny, and Blaine found himself transfixed by the very faint ripple of the muscles under Kurt's skin; the lack of much body fat made it easier to see, even though Kurt hardly looked like the more athletic boys in school, but he was incredibly attractive.  
  
Blaine rocked harder against him, and Kurt cried out softly as he reached down to fumble for the button of Blaine's pants. But as much as he wanted to feel Kurt's hand around him - warm and soft and tight... there was something he wanted more.  
  
Though he couldn't figure out how he knew to want certain things or what would feel good as opposed to just feeling, well, like a dog licking your neck, there was one thing he remembered clearly how he found out about it. It had been during the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and while he couldn't be sure he thought it was probably early evening because his father wasn't home yet but had already left the office. A man called the house in a panic, but because he asked for Mr. Anderson instead of Dr. Anderson and because he sounded so young with his high-pitched voice and awkward phrasing, Edgar had mistakenly assumed the call was for Blaine. Before he could explain the mistake, the man had launched into a lengthy confession detailing what he had done in the past weeks that signaled a horrific backslide into depravity and pleading,  _begging_  desperately for help.  
  
And the man had surely needed it. After all, he had described in gritty detail sinking to his knees in front of a desk and taking someone's erection into his mouth and sucking-  
  
He had been disgusted..and terrified because in and amongst the revulsion had been a strong frisson of excitement and curiosity.   
  
He had never understood why the thought made him so excited, what it was about putting something that should be disgusting and dirty into his mouth that made his stomach clench and feel hot all over, but it had invaded his dreams more times than he cared to count, and now that he had Kurt beneath him...  
  
Blaine slipped down, and Kurt lifted his head quickly to stare at him. "Can I try...something?" he asked hesitantly. When Kurt drew in a deep breath and nodded, eyes wide and curious, Blaine unfastened Kurt's trousers and lowered the zipper. Sliding his hand slowly up the front of the pants, he could feel the tenting hardness under his palm and gave a gentle squeeze. Kurt groaned and let his head fall back again. Blaine felt his breath catch as he shifted the waistband of Kurt's underwear down enough to fish out his erection, watching as it popped free.  
  
Last time it had been all fumbling and quick stroking and everything done by feel. Now, staring at it, everything felt so much more  _real_  and terrifying.  
  
And like if he didn't do something in the next ten seconds he was going to die.  
  
It was difficult finding a good place to position himself, and Blaine finally settled for lying face-down on the bottom half of the bed with his legs bent at the knees, shins brushing against the footboard. Hurriedly adjusting himself and nudging Kurt's legs apart with his shoulder, he grasped the base of Kurt's cock. It felt heavy in his hand, warm, and he fought the urge to just start pumping for all he was worth. Instead he quickly leaned forward and, trying to remember any details from the phone call that might not have worked their way into his numerous dreams, lowered his mouth onto the tip.  
  
It should have been disgusting. The taste was salty and kind of strange and musky, and there was no way he could get most of it into his mouth - his mouth was already stretching to accommodate the head...but just the  _feeling_  of it, the weight against his tongue, the stretch of his lips, the way he could almost feel the pulse of blood just under the skin, made Blaine moan. Kurt gasped and his hips canted up, and Blaine almost choked, pulling back quickly. Undeterred, he splayed his free hand on Kurt's hip and resumed his position.  
  
As it turned out, the man who had tearfully confessed to liking this had been  _under_ selling how sexually appealing it was. Shins bracing against the footboard, Blaine rocked his hips forward against the comforter as he explored with his tongue, listening to Kurt mewl and whimper and moan. A tentative suck brought the most amazing sound yet, and Blaine groaned. Kurt's hand flew out to grip the comforter, fist clenching. "I-...Blaine-..." He couldn't bring himself to lift his head, not when it felt this good, and was relieved when the next thing he heard was a whimpered, "More-"  
  
He had no idea what he was doing, but Kurt sure as hell seemed to like it and that was more than hot enough for him. He felt borderline ridiculous, rutting against the bed and trying desperately to get enough friction while one hand held Kurt in place and the other held his hips, moaning and grunting more obscenely than in even his most sexually-charged fantasy, but it was the look on Kurt's face, the way he panted and gasped and squirmed and tried to get more of everything as he clutched the blanket in his white-knuckled fist, that really made this addictive.  
  
When it ended, Blaine thought, he would want to do this again. And again after that. And again after that.  
  
For the first time in his life, that thought didn't stop him cold in his tracks. Instead, he redoubled his efforts and gasped as he felt Kurt's body stiffen before spilling into his mouth. He pulled away quickly, choking and sputtering - the taste was odd but left him moaning anyway as he rocked his hips hard against the mattress once, twice, three times more before his own orgasm hit, soaking his boxers and soiling the inside of his uniform trousers.  
  
There was a long moment of no one speaking and no conscious movement, just heavy breathing and soft sighs as the haze of endorphins began to dissipate. "Okay?" Kurt asked quietly at last, breathless, looking up at Blaine like he half expected him to bolt naked from his own dorm room and streak down the hall in a blind panic.  
  
In truth, Blaine didn't know how he was supposed to feel. On one hand, obviously the physical aspect had been incredibly pleasurable, but that fact alone had never let him feel good before and he wasn't sure that could start now. On the other, the intense intimacy of the entire thing was nearly overwhelming. He hadn't expected that; he hadn't expected this part, where he wanted to curl himself around Kurt and hold him as tightly as possible. He had never thought he would feel as though Kurt suddenly knew extra secrets about him even though, strictly speaking, no new information had been revealed.  
  
But mostly...  
  
He wasn't sure how to go from being absolutely certain that something was wrong for feeling good, to believing that this sort of pleasure was completely natural and good; how to go from seeing the entire thing as blind hedonism, which would bring nothing but shame, downfall, heartache, disease, and misery...to letting it be cast in the sort of warm glow that seemed to light Kurt's face from within. Kurt's studies felt convincing, but so had everything else. So had everything he'd been taught for so long, and even if he  _wanted_  to believe it, was that maybe just his own pathetic attempts at justifying everything so he wouldn't have to acknowledge how sick he was?  
  
He remembered the question Kurt had asked him from the bathroom floor the night he'd come over, rainsoaked, to beg for help: did it feel wrong because it  _felt_  unnatural, or did it feel wrong because other people said it should?  
  
Did this  _feel_  bad because it actually was, or because men like his father had told him his entire life to avoid it?  
  
"Blaine?"  
  
Kurt's voice was soft but concerned, and when he looked up to meet Kurt's eyes he looked concerned - eyes narrowed as he tried to read him, head tilted just so. In the dim light his skin seemed to almost glow, brown hair splayed across the pillow carelessly, clothes half-off and askew, looking debauched but at the same time...  
  
...so beautiful.   
  
He thought back to the way Kurt had looked during: straining, bucking, whimpering and moaning and clinging to him because it felt too good. Even now, he looked tired and...contented. Happy. Sated, as though there was nothing else he needed to search for as long as they could stay right here, in this bed, for a very long time.  
  
If the worst thing he had done in all of it was hurting this boy when he ran away, if that was his most abhorrent and disgusting act...then maybe earlier had been the best. The most true.  
  
The most beautiful.  
  
Because how could making someone as amazing as Kurt feel  _that good_  ever be wrong? Bringing pleasure to someone so amazing and loving and moral and strong...that could only be good, right?  
  
"Yeah?" he asked quietly, his voice sounding dry and rough to his ears.  
  
"Are you okay?" Kurt glanced from him to the door, and he could tell what Kurt was wondering:  _Are you leaving now? Are you going to throw me out so you can deny everything we did? Are you going to hate me for this?  
  
Will you still love me tomorrow?_  
  
He wanted to answer strongly in the affirmative, but that would be a lie so he answered as honestly as he could. "I think so."  
  
It was the closest to okay he had ever been about the issue, and he had a feeling it was going to continue to improve. Evil thoughts that brought about evil actions were wrong, but truly evil thoughts could never bring about something so good. That really did mean Kurt had to be right. The song had to be right.  
  
They were all right.  
  
"Should I go?" Kurt tried to keep his voice noncommittal, but Blaine could see beyond that.  
  
"Please stay?" Blaine asked quietly. Kurt nodded and didn't move from the bed, and Blaine found himself wanting to thank him for not leaving. For being patient when he had every right not to be. For being amazing. For loving him.  
  
They hadn't said it, but he knew.  
  
He moved up the bed and laid down beside Kurt, wrapping his arms around him. Kurt rolled onto his side, pressing back against Blaine's chest. He folded his arms over Blaine's as though trying to keep him in place, and Blaine smiled faintly. "I'm not going anywhere," he stated quietly.  
  
For once, he didn't even want to.


	30. Chapter 30

The atmosphere backstage was as hectic as it always was during competitions - boys in uniforms swarming around the female members of other teams who had come back for warmups, boys from public schools fussing with their ties, girls from public schools trying to gently rebuff the flirting efforts of some boys while making doe eyes in Blaine's general direction-  
  
Kurt noticed that one but was too busy being terrified to comment on it.  
  
He couldn't put a precise note on which aspect of this was making him the most anxious. For one thing, there was always a little bit of pre-competition excitement that sometimes appeared as exhilaration and sometimes - like at Sectionals - turned into nervousness. For another, and the most obvious contender: this was his first solo in a competition setting before. It wasn't his first public solo, though as he thought back to Founders' Day he realized he remembered very little of the actual performance. He remembered being hurt and feeling exhausted by Blaine's hot-and-cold act. He remembered Blaine trying to apologize afterwards because they never could stay away from each other when they sang. He remembered how much it ached to walk away...but the performance itself was all kind of a blur.  
  
So there was that.  
  
There was the fact that so much of this was riding on him, and while he knew the Warblers had warmed to him over the past seven months there was still a sense that he was a bit of an eccentric outsider. Especially now that they knew he was leaving at the end of the year, there was a feeling that Kurt never had been (and now never would be) truly one of them. It wasn't from everyone, but a few of the guys still looked at him with suspicion. If he messed up, there would surely be allegations of disloyalty even though he had no interest in losing. Even if Nationals weren't somewhere exciting this year, like New York, he did want to go. Baltimore still had to be better than Ohio.  
  
A part of him was more anxious because he knew people in the audience. He wanted to impress them - a few in particular. he knew his dad would be proud of him and probably not even know if he screwed up. As much as his father was supportive, he knew nothing about choirs, or music at all really. Carole and finn would congratulate him regardless, and as he hadn't actually seen Mercedes since the ruling came down, her hug would be extra big today no matter how he performed.  
  
But Rachel had also made the trip and would offer endless tips and pointers - all very well-meaning and far too enthusiastic. He, of course, would have done the same (albeit more sarcastic than shrill) were she performing.  
  
The real problem, he concluded as he stood backstage and toyed nervously with his fingers, was the song.  
  
It wasn't that he didn't love the song - he did. He loved the raw emotion of it all, and the message, and the hope intertwined through it all. He could appreciate the sentiment, as it was kind of his mantra. And obviously anything that got the Warblers performing Broadway was a good thing, in his eyes - Billboard chart-toppers were fun and a good crowd-pleaser, but they rarely contained the type of deep feelings that a Broadway musical could convey. They skimmed the surface instead of diving to the heart of overwhelming passion; singing this would be a nice change.  
  
But popular hits were safe. This wasn't.  
  
Music may have been the universal language, but that didn't mean its message was always  _understood_  by the listener. He didn't even want to think about how many times he'd been shot down for wanting to sing a girl song because boys didn't do such things, and that was nothing compared to what had happened during the now-infamous "South Pacific" production. No one in Lima knew the show particularly well - outside Shelby and Rachel and of course Kurt, with a handful of other semi-cultured people who owned the cast recording - and when they had done the first read-through, one of the men who had been cast as an ensemble sailor got to the intro to "Carefully Taught" and stormed out. By the next day there was an organized protest sweeping through town; how dare a community group try and use the arts to force their desegregationist agenda on the rest of them? They had struggled on for a few weeks before an anonymous arson threat shut down production.  
  
Rachel still listed it on her resume; Kurt wanted to never speak of it again.  
  
He wasn't entirely sure this would be any different. A few years had passed, sure, but the people he knew growing up were still the same. No one had miraculously changed their mind about Mercedes in the past few years, and even now from what he could tell there was quite a bit of unrest. People didn't take too kindly to being told they were wrong, even in song.  
  
And that was about something that at least most of the country had either made up their minds about already or learned to live with. That was over something that had been the law for more than five years now. He and Blaine were-  
  
If they got up there and sang this...  
  
He wasn't sure when Blaine had stopped seeing things through such paranoid eyes.   
  
On one hand, he was incredibly happy for that. Blaine learning to trust a little bit, to accept that he wasn't inherently a sick or evil person, was the only reason they had a chance together - Kurt understood that. He understood that it had been an enormous struggle for Blaine to accept who he was and who they were together.  
  
What he didn't understand was how the boy who was still terrified of anyone finding out about them could be so blind when it came to the reasons this song was the wrong one to choose.  
  
It was a song about people who were different finding a place. It was a song about forbidden love that no one can know about and dreaming of one day having a relationship that they can revel in instead of hiding. It was a song about everything they were and everything that they couldn't tell anyone they were. And while Kurt didn't know what precisely people in Ohio did to homosexuals, he did know what the people in Lima had done to anyone they perceived as different. And it wasn't pretty.  
  
If they sang this...if they sang this song in front of all these people...and they couldn't keep their hands off each other because god only knew what happened to Kurt's willpower when Blaine was in the same room, let alone when he sang...  
  
He could imagine the death threats already. The bomb threats. The calls to his father like Mercedes' father got?   
  
To say nothing of the fact that they would lose, because no judge in their right mind would consider it an appropriate performance, and then he would be stuck at Dalton for the rest of the year with boys who blamed him for their performance while his family was more than two hours away getting threats from narrow-minded Ohioans who were already angry about the way things were changing too fast for their neanderthal preferences.  
  
This was a horrible mistake, they shouldn't be-  
  
Blaine bounced over, amping himself up for the performance with his usual jumping and loosening up; he looked like the male gymnasts Kurt had watched obsessively on television during the Olympics in Melbourne when he was 14, the way Blaine tilted his head from side to side and rolled his shoulders as he bounced on the balls of his feet. He looked over, head cocked, and asked, "Are you nervous?"  
  
Kurt paused his twisting fingers. He thought about saying no - he wasn't nervous. He was terrified. "Please don't judge me," he offered instead. "I...I think this might be a mistake, Blaine. I think it's going to be too controversial. You know I'm not one to run away from who we are, but there's a difference between being brave and being foolhardy. Getting up there and singing this in front of everyone - there's no way it's going to end well."  
  
Blaine stood beside him, staring out onto the stage for a moment. The curtain was still closed, and the stage was empty as the speakers crackled with the pre-show announcements. He drew in a deep breath, looking Kurt over for a moment, before replying with a quiet but certain, "It doesn't matter."  
  
"What?" Kurt asked, staring at him. Of course it mattered. Of course it mattered that people were going to get threatened as a result, that the Warblers would hate him for ruining their shot at Nationals, that-  
  
"We're leaving soon," Blaine pointed out with a beaming smile. "We're finding somewhere safe and that's exactly what this song is about. It'll be fine." He crossed to stand in front of Kurt, carefully but platonicly smoothing his lapel. His fingers lingered over the Warbler pin - his Warbler pin, tacked neatly onto Kurt's jacket, and Kurt smiled faintly as he felt it. He had been right: it was enough that just the two of them knew. The comfort it brought was still there.  
  
"Maybe you should just go sing it," Kurt suggested. "It might be more acceptable to-"  
  
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen," crackled the speaker above their heads as the emcee began his announcements, "and welcome to the 1960 Midwest Regional Show Choir Championship!"  
  
"Kurt, it will be fine," Blaine assured him.   
  
"How can you be so sure?" What he wanted to ask was, who in the world had replaced the terrified Blaine who was convinced they would be found out just going to the drive-in in the middle of nowhere, with someone who was perfectly content to sing their own personal love song onstage?   
  
Blaine's smile changes suddenly, from something proud and confident to something far more tender. "Because you showed me that," he replied, looking at Kurt with so much adoration it almost made Kurt ache.  
  
"And please give a warm welcome to our judges: local broadcasting legend and man-about-town, Rod Remington!" Kurt had often wondered if the anchor ever actually had time to do the news anymore, since every competition he had ever been part of included him as a judge whether the majority of the teams competing were from Western Ohio or not. "Former fifth member of the smash doo-wop group, The Four Swells, Jerry Bob Lee!" He wondered how hit they were if he'd never heard of them, and looking around at the Warblers - who knew every hit song in the past five years like the back of their collective hands - and the blank looks that signified a total lack of recognition, Kurt could guess that he wasn't the only one. "And Federal Court Judge and avid golf enthusiast, Patrick Sullivan!"  
  
Something odd happened as the third judge was announced: the usual polite clapping that the well-practiced audience gave even to those they had never heard of was interrupted by a sort of disgruntled rumbling from part of the audience. An uncomfortable tenseness settled over the crowd, and the applause suddenly sounded even more polite rather than genuine or enthusiastic. It took Kurt a moment to realize why.   
  
He knew that name.  
  
He knew that name because it was all over newspaper articles he'd been keeping in a box under his bed. It was in a few national magazines he'd gone out and bought at the local newsstand, where the cashier looked at him strangely for buying something other than Vogue. It was on the judicial opinion he had poured over in the library for six straight nights with a law dictionary beside him, trying to understand every word, but knowing that the bottom line was...this man was the reason that he and Mercedes could go to the same school.  
  
From the time he had read the first article about the ruling, he had been curious about the elusive Judge Sullivan. Anyone who had been appointed by a Republican president and was a wealthy Midwesterner and graduate of Notre Dame hardly seemed the type to be on the forefront of civil rights. Curiosity getting the better of him, he sidestepped quickly to the edge of the curtain and attempted to peek out through the gap into the audience. He caught a quick glimpse before the heavy velvet fell back into place and obscured his view: tall-ish, slim, with round wiry spectacles and wiry white hair. His suit was nice but plain, his tie simple and narrow, and he stood and waved at the crowd with an unreadable expression as substantial factions cheered and grumbled in equal numbers.  
  
He looked like any ordinary man Kurt could have ever met, and it was because of him that Lima was going to have to change. He had no reason whatsoever to be the cause of that, to fix the wrongs that had been allowed to linger, and yet...  
  
...He was from Chicago, Kurt remembered. Maybe that was the difference. He was from a city, he was from somewhere other than the cesspit of proud backwards ideology and fierce ignorance. Chief Justice Earl Warren was from California, after all, just like where Leroy said there were so many different kinds of people...maybe that was why Judge Sullivan could understand people like Mercedes and recognize the fundamental truths that were shouted down time and again in Lima.  
  
...Maybe there were others like this Judge Sullivan out there. In the places he and Blaine would go once they could leave Ohio.  
  
He had survived this long in a tiny town without anyone doing anything truly horrible; he would survive another year. The people in his backwards hamlet had better things to pay attention to than a show choir competition.  
  
As long as he didn't do anything outlandish. As long as he could keep his hands off Blaine long enough to sing.  
  
As long as Blaine still had enough of a self-preservation instinct to keep his hands off Kurt long enough to sing.  
  
Blaine saw the change in his demeanor and squeezed his shoulder with a proud grin. "Let's go win this," he declared as the Warblers trailed onto stage and into their places on the risers. Kurt hesitated and followed a moment later, still nervous but not nearly so petrified.  
  
At the very least, now all he had to worry about was opening his mouth and having no words come out.  
  
As the curtain rose and the Warblers [began](http://youtu.be/ci7wAB78evE), Kurt drew in a deep breath. He could do this. He cast a glance over at Blaine, searching out some kind of reassuring smile, but Blaine was already dutifully singing his "oo"s and couldn't do much in response.  
  
He was on his own.  
  
But he could do this - he'd been singing for as long as he could remember, and certainly for longer than Blaine had been around. He had been seeking out solos his entire life, and just because he finally got one and it hadn't been snatched away by Rachel because she was a girl or by Finn because he was Mr. Schuester's favourite or by Blaine because the Warblers worshiped the ground he danced on, didn't mean he was any less capable right now than he'd always known he was.  
  
He closed his eyes for a moment, drawing in another calming breath to center himself as he stepped off the riser and began to sing.  
  
 _There's a place for us  
Somewhere a place for us  
Peace and quiet and open air  
Wait for us  
Somewhere_  
  
He could picture it so clearly in that moment. He and Blaine in the apartment he'd been subconsciously decorating since he was 10, Blaine in an elegant wingback chair, holding a classic novel while Kurt lounged on the chaise with the latest issue of Vogue, singing along quietly while West Side Story played on the record player over near the window. And every once in awhile, looking over and seeing Blaine watching him, gazing over with that adoring look...that look that Kurt had no idea what he'd ever done to earn, the one that Blaine gave him now as soon as they were alone whether they were singing or not.   
  
He looked over as he heard Blaine step off the risers to begin his verse, and there the look was - right in front of him. There were Warblers there and an entire auditorium full of people, and Blaine was looking at him like he was the most incredible person he'd ever met. He blushed under the gaze, trying desperately to look away...because he should. Because two boys couldn't sing a love song to each other onstage - because as far as anyone else was concerned, two boys couldn't be in love with each other...but he couldn't help it. He couldn't stop smiling even as he ducked his head and tried to force his gaze forward.  
  
 _There's a time for us  
Someday a time for us  
Time together with time to spare  
Time to learn  
Time to care_  
  
Blaine couldn't help watching Kurt as he stepped downstage; the boy had it all. He was beautiful and smart and so incredibly talented...and the bravest person Blaine had ever met. He could stand in front of a crowd of a thousand people and sing this song even though he had told Blaine it scared him. He could stand up in a world that told him everything about him was wrong and just-...  
  
...he could create entire worlds by sheer force of imagination. He could create a future so vivid Blaine actually believed in it.  
  
That was the thing; when he'd selected the song, it had been because he was close to thinking it was real and he needed convincing the rest of the way. By the time he heard Kurt sing it, saw the genuine belief in his eyes, saw how moved he was by just the thought...he didn't need any more help knowing it was real. It  _was_. That world was out there. It was waiting for them, and they would be together and happy and  _together_  and no one would be able to tell them they were wrong.  
  
He had asked Kurt about it as they lay in bed together, bare skin touching bare skin, breathing slow and even. "This place," he had begun slowly, hesitantly, trying to pick every word carefully so he was sure he got the most accurate, thorough answer he could. "How do we find it?"  
  
Kurt had shifted to look him more directly in the eye, then paused as he studied him. Pushing back an errant curl, he had replied, "I don't know."  
  
"Then how do you know it exists?"  
  
Kurt hmmed a moment, then replied simply, "Leroy told me."  
  
"So he's been there?"  
  
"Sort of," Kurt replied with a faint smile. "Sort of not. Awhile ago. But he said the coasts are safe, especially cities. And anywhere with as many inverts as New York has to have - with all the music and theatre and art and fashion - has to be chock full of people like us."  
  
The way Kurt lit up when he talked about it, the way he sounded so certain even though he'd never seen it, was the way people on Sunday morning revivals talked about God. Not like his parents' friends, who acknowledged religion only in the way that all society people were good Christians - the kind of deep-seeded, all-encompassing, unshakable  _faith_  in something better being out there. In there being meaning and purpose to everything.  
  
Anything that Kurt, a logical and intelligent boy, could be that certain of, Blaine could find reason to believe in, especially in the dim post-coital haze of evening in his dorm room. After all, Kurt had been right about everything else.   
  
 _Someday  
Somewhere  
We'll find a new way of living  
We'll find a way of forgiving  
Somewhere_  
  
Kurt managed to tear his eyes away from Blaine as they began to sing together - otherwise he would move too close and fight the urge to do something potentially deadly like forget the audience was there and start touching him. It had been harder than ever since the other night, since seeing Blaine so exposed and feeling Blaine's hands on his skin, but he did have some semblance of self-preservation instincts. He wanted to find his crowd in the audience, like he had at Sectionals when Rachel stage-mothered him into having a good time...though this time, there was no way he could keep the grin off his face as he sang.  
  
Instead, he was distracted by something else.   
  
He had prepared himself for the audience to dislike the performance. After the way the crowd had been so divided by the judge's presence, and after South Pacific, he expected they would be polite at best, staging mass exodus at worst. But everywhere he looked, he saw...smiles.  
  
He was singing about being madly in love with Blaine, and here were people  _smiling_?  
  
Okay, obviously they were doing an acceptable job of covering that part. Or the audience didn't know what they were looking at - considering Kurt doubted they would ever consider the idea of two boys being anything closer than best friends, that was entirely probable, if only because he knew he hadn't stopped smiling since Blaine had come downstage and it was much easier to fake an emotion that wasn't there than to cover one that was.  
  
But even if they didn't recognize what the song meant to the boys singing it, did they understand...?  
  
He found Mercedes, and she was beaming, hand over her heart as she watched him sing. It was kind of about them too, he guessed, if one ignored the fact that it came from the middle of a deep romantic love story. After waiting impatiently for most of their lives, they were finally allowed to go to school together, and that had to count for something as far as the song was concerned, right?  
  
And New York and Broadway and their future adventures there meant just as much to Rachel as it did to him, though for completely different reasons.  
  
Because the song wasn't just about him and Blaine and their future, was it? he realized suddenly. There was a reason some stories and songs were timeless: they transcended the limited context of the original rendition and could be applied to so many other circumstances. He and Blaine weren't the only ones who needed to go somewhere else to find belonging. They weren't the only ones that the world couldn't understand, they weren't the only ones who needed to wait not-so-patiently for the world to change before they could truly be themselves.  
  
For the people in the audience who already had a place, it was just a nice, popular song from a musical everyone had heard of. For them, it was...whatever the Broadway equivalent of Billboard would be. But for the people in the audience who were still looking - like he was - it meant exactly what he was trying to convey.  
  
(He wondered for a fleeting moment if there were any others like him and Blaine in the auditorium. Doubtful, he knew, because there were already two of them out of the thousand or so people in the building and really, how many of them could there be?)  
  
 _There's a place for us  
A time and place for us  
Hold my hand and we're halfway there  
Hold my hand and I'll take you there_  
  
It took immense physical restraint to not reach for Kurt's hand the way he had on the day they met, so Blaine settled for angling a little more in his direction and singing his heart out toward Kurt. When Kurt looked over at him with his coy little smile like he had the world's best secret and couldn't wait to whisper it in his ear, he almost melted.  
  
 _Somehow  
Someday  
Somewhere_  
  
The applause was thunderous and Kurt felt almost light-headed at the sound. He glanced at Blaine out of the corner of his eye to time their bows, and as he stood he felt Blaine grab him by the shoulders and drag him to center stage. He looked around for a moment, almost bewildered, but the proud grin on Blaine's face told him all he needed to know. The cheers got louder for a moment, and he could see his father standing and applauding, hands up at eye-level in a sign of enthusiasm, Carole beside him looking so proud, Finn cheering for him...Rachel practically bouncing up and down with excitement. He beamed, bowing for a second time, then scurried into place for the next song right as the Warblers [began it.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KStsPPgeka4)  
  
 _Rama lama-lama, lama-lama ding-dong  
Rama lama-lama, lama-lama ding_  
  
The shift from the anguished, wistful ballad to the upbeat popular song, combined with the rush of adrenaline that came from his first ever competition solo, left Kurt feeling almost breathless and reeling. He struggled to refocus as Bill proudly and at long last got his higher-than-high mini-solo, knocking it out of the park.  
  
Blaine looked no worse for the wear from their duet, Kurt noticed as he began the first verse. If anything he looked more invigorated than ever, downright exuberant.  
  
 _Oh oh oh oh  
I got a girl named Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong  
She's everything to me  
Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong  
I'll never set her free  
For she's mine, all mine_  
  
The crowd was on its feet, cheering and clapping along with the music; if they had been appreciative and moved by the duet, they wanted to start dancing to this which was exactly what they wanted. You didn't want to dance along to rote, mechanical songs with no heart - you wanted to jump up and down to songs with heart behind them. Even if it was a fluffy radio song without much emotion behind it, there was a difference between technically perfect music and music with energy...and this was definitely the latter.   
  
He had been right, Blaine knew, but he wouldn't gloat. Them winning would be reward enough, and with a crowd response like this, it didn't matter what the other two teams did: They were going to Baltimore.  
  
He was never more himself than when he sang, and today was the epitome of that. There were no rules. No preconceived notions of what he should do or say or how he should act, and he could just-  
  
He could sing a duet with the most amazing boy in the world and make the audience  _love_  them for it. He could do anything.  
  
There was nothing in the universe better than that feeling, he was absolutely certain.  
  
 _I love her,  
Love her, love her so.  
That I'll never, never let her go.  
You may be certain she's mine, all mine,  
She's mine all of the time._  
  
Kurt wasn't sure when he started swapping out all the 'she's for 'he's. Maybe it was the way Blaine kept grinning over at him with his infectious "I'm singing and people are cheering and it's  _fantastic_ " energy that made Kurt start beaming. Maybe it was the way Blaine was singing with so much genuine charisma and heart that it seemed like there was no way he could fake how happy he was - he really was in love with someone and claiming them for his own.  
  
Maybe it was because with a made-up name like that, what other details in the song were made up?  
  
Maybe it was because it was how he felt: in love with a boy who was everything to him that he would never let go.  
  
 _Oh I got a girl named Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong  
She's everything to me  
Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong  
I'll never set her free  
For she's mine, all mine_  
  
The song ended to thunderous applause, and the boys stood neatly, evenly-spaced across the stage, hands clasped in front of themselves, as they took an orderly bow before the illusion of proper schoolboys was thrown off and they practically piled on one another for a congratulatory group hug. The cheers were deafening, and more than anything they had given every ounce of everything they had.   
  
And they had been fantastic.  
  
Kurt and Blaine were quickly swept to the center of the hug, everyone wanting a piece of their soloists, and Kurt felt Blaine embrace him tightly. What a difference six weeks made; after his last solo, he wanted nothing to do with him, and now...now he felt the entire world melt away as he heard Blaine whisper to him, "You're amazing."  
  
* * * * *  
  
Judge Patrick Sullivan knew about as much about music as he knew about cooking, and as his wife could attest to, he knew absolutely nothing about the kitchen. She had gone out of town once for a weekend with her friends in the D.A.R. and he had nearly burned down the house trying to make a tv dinner. So he wasn't entirely sure why he'd been asked to judge this competition; from the looks of his fellow judges, there weren't a lot of people chomping at the bit to decide which of the three choirs was best.  
  
But, as there were very few lawyers wanting to take him out for a round of golf these days, and as he had nothing else to do with his Saturdays, he'd agreed. While he knew nothing about music, he did at least enjoy listening to it. He knew what he liked, at least.  
  
And of the three groups, there was one song he really liked.  
  
He listened silently to the other two men discuss whether there was something queer about those two boys. He had no idea - who could tell what was strange about young people anymore? When he was a child, all children wore white; by the time his youngest brother came along, he was dressed in all pink because that was a strong, manly colour while blue was dainty and feminine. Now only little girls wore pink - scores of it on his grandaughters' dresses every Sunday. Only little girls and grown men, wearing pink under their suits to go to work proper, respectable jobs.  
  
The world changed so fast sometimes he could barely keep up.   
  
But sometimes that was a good thing.  
  
Growing up Irish Catholic in Chicago hadn't been especially challenging for him. But he remembered the stories his mother (Peggy, God rest her soul) had told him when he was young, about walking down the street with her father and seeing signs that said "No Irish Need Apply" - streets he walked down without a second thought, where Mick was more common a nickname than any other and most houses, including his own, had a Fighting Irish banner hanging from the front porch. He had grown up in an environment where heritage was something a person could be proud of instead of needing to worry or being pressured to lie about it...but close enough to that time to know it wasn't something to take for granted.  
  
And even now he could see things changing. He remembered when poor Al Smith had run for President in 1928, only to lose to that damned fool, Herbert Hoover. The smear campaigns had shocked him, a young and idealistic man in his twenties and fresh out of law school; they said Smith would take orders from the Pope. That he would laze around the White House all day with illegal booze in his hand, passing out drunk instead of working. That he would repeal prohibition to let all the "ethnics" run wild in the cities.  
  
He hadn't known he was still an 'ethnic'. As far as he was concerned, that moniker belonged to a new group - those new immigrants, who had come over in his lifetime. He made the mistake of saying so once at Sunday dinner; his mother hadn't spoken to him for three days.  
  
She was right, of course. Who was he to judge, even if everyone else around them did? To outsiders, they were all just as low.  
  
How sad it was that the arguments hadn't changed, he thought as he read the papers every week. The established old-guard pointed at whoever was newer, was poorer, was more easily distinguished, and said they would corrupt everything good in the country. They would destroy the cities with their looting and drunken carousing. They would destroy the morality of good, hardworking people. And schools would soon be required to teach that these people were equals unless the 'good people of America' put a stop to it.  
  
But things had changed. Al Smith lost in a landslide because people were terrified of Catholics and the mysterious Pope, and here was this young upstart of a Senator winning primaries for the Democratic nomination for President despite his Roman Catholic faith. Whether he would win or not was anyone's guess, but the fact that his Catholicism could only be whispered about instead of being challenged outright was a monumental step in the right direction.  
  
Someday that step would happen for the negro, he knew that; it was his fervent hope that would come sooner, rather than later.   
  
They all had a right to their place, a right to walk through life with heads held high, to be people - not just Puerto Ricans or Italians, or Irish or Polish, but humans with a sense of dignity and belonging.  
  
He wasn't sure how voting in these types of competitions worked; he was used to the law, in which there was a very precise series of questions a judge needed to ask himself in order to guide the path to the answer. Here he had not so much as a rubric to go by, which he took to mean it was like a particular type of case of first impression: an uncharted area of the law that was governed and defined by the  _absence_  of relevant and applicable law. In those cases, where there truly was little else to go by, he approached it from a policy standpoint: What would each outcome yield? What path would they start down if a particular action was rewarded in a certain way? Who would benefit?  
  
There was enough sociological evidence now to show that children who grew up being told they were inferior would believe it, even if the words were never spoken. The way to combat that had to be by telling children that they weren't, in fact, any less. That they were just as entitled as everyone else.  
  
That they all had a right to their place.  
  
There was only one team he could legitimately vote for as the winner.


	31. Chapter 31

Kurt could practically hear [Theme from a Summer Place](http://youtu.be/tSsiS-v6_6M) playing around him as he walked down the hall after class on Monday. Clutching the shoulder strap of his bag, he could help but beam as he strode confidently down the halls. To be entirely honest, it was all he could do not to skip, dreamy-eyed and breathing in slow, deep happy sighs.   
  
It had been the perfect weekend. The absolute perfect weekend - winning Regionals with his first ever solo in front of a competition audience, singing with Blaine looking at him like he was the most amazing person ever, followed by dinner with his family and Mercedes and Rachel, then an evening of plan-making with Mercedes for the upcoming year. There were so many things to talk about, so many songs to suggest, so many clothes to purchase because his year-long moratorium was almost over; as much as he did enjoy Dalton, he would be happy if he never saw another navy blue wool-blend blazer in his life. They had made lists of songs and potential buys for  _hours_ , flicking slowly through catalogs and circulars, and giggling over what various people in glee club would say about their song suggestions.   
  
It would be amazing when he got back. And in the meantime, he had these last few months with Blaine before he went off to New York. As much as he hated the idea of not seeing him every day, as much as he already was trying to plan out just how much money he would need to save for the kinds of long-distance phone calls he would want to make all the time to tell his boyfriend every little detail of his day, everything about the new state of his old school and what Rachel wore that was absolutely atrocious, to ask about Blaine's classes and how fabulous New York was, to ask about whether it lived up to their dream...it was only a year. And then he would be following Blaine  _to New York_  and they would have everything.  
  
They would have duets together for the rest of their lives.  
  
That one might be corny even for him, he acknowledged with a smile and a roll of his eyes at himself, pausing to adjust his hair as he turned the corner toward the Commons. But he couldn't help himself - he was absolutely in love with the boy, and the boy was in love with him too, and it was like every romantic movie he'd ever seen: the soft lighting, the orchestra swelling in the background, the inability to stop beaming with unrepentant, unrestrained, untameable  _joy_.  
  
He'd never felt that before. Not in his life, not for more than five seconds.  
  
For as long as he could remember, he had been sad. Lonely, even with Mercedes around. Even though he had a family that loved him, and even though he was rarely actually  _alone_ , it had felt for most of his life like nothing ever went his way. His mother had died and that had been devastating beyond words, and then the house got quiet. Even with Mrs. Jones around, who was decidedly not a quiet person, it never felt as joyous as it had when his mother had been alive. Then Carole and Finn had joined the family, and that helped - his father certainly seemed happier - but it was nothing at all compared to  _this_.  
  
Of course, could anything compare to the fact that he had sung a duet with a boy?  
  
He still couldn't believe it sometimes, a happy sigh escaping as he remembered the way it felt, being up there on stage with Blaine and feeling everything else stop and melt away even just for a moment. He had sung a duet  _with a boy_ , a boy he  _loved_. At Sectionals he had lamented that such a thing would never be an option for him, even if Blaine did like him - watching the boy and girl from the Asian school dance and being so happy and so completely in love with each other...now all that was left was actually dancing with Blaine.  
  
He imagined Blaine would be an incredible dancer. All that natural poise and charisma, combined with what Kurt imagined were years of upper-crust dance lessons that he himself had begged for but never could afford.   
  
This time a year ago he'd been waiting on pins and needles to find out whether he and Mercedes would ever get to do the things they'd planned, and he'd felt like he would always be strange and an outcast and alone, and now here he was - with a solo and a boy and a best friend (and a fake girlfriend who was quickly becoming more of a friend than an enemy), and the only way it could get any better was in a year when he left Ohio for good and moved to New York to reassemble everything good about his life there.  
  
He pulled open the door to the Commons, expecting the sort of applause that had greeted Blaine at the first rehearsal after their win at Sectionals. Okay, maybe not quite that loud - his was only a duet, technically, and Blaine did still have his own solo so it was probably right that he got slightly more applause. Regardless, they had won so it only stood to reason-  
  
Though everyone was already there, the room was deadly silent, eyes downturned toward the elaborate rug and the shined hardwood coffee table. Bill looked confused, blinking quickly, eyebrows knitted together as he tried to figure out what exactly had happened. Jeff and Nick stared blankly straight ahead, shoulder-to-shoulder, elbows resting on their knees. Sam's expression was sullen, mouth a tight frown, arms crossed over his chest as he slumped on the couch. Rick looked angry, glaring at a painting on the wall with narrow eyes and the occasional shake of his head as though he wanted to rip down the artwork and tear it to shreds with his bare hands, frame and all.  
  
Had someone died?  
  
His eyes immediately scanned the room for Blaine, and he let out a sigh of relief as he saw the familiar profile...but Blaine looked shell-shocked. His head was bowed, hands clasped tightly in his lap; he didn't look at anyone, didn't glance up even as the double doors swung closed behind Kurt with a dull thunk that echoed in the eerie stillness of the room.  
  
He couldn't see anyone missing, everyone was accounted-for as far as he knew, he- he wasn't missing anyone, was he? When he was counting, he didn't think there was anyone who could have met some sort of horrible fate in the past two days-  
  
The Council looked most grave of all. Thad looked as though someone had punched him in the stomach. Wes stared at the gavel, which he clutched tighter than usual as if it were a talisman that would save them all from whatever funk had settled over the group. David's eyes never left his notebook, posture stiff, eyebrows lowered in what looked from there like anger but Kurt couldn't be sure-  
  
"What's going on?" Kurt ventured when no one spoke. A few heads jerked up as though they hadn't noticed him come in; Blaine's didn't.  
  
"Let's get started," Wes suggested. His voice was tight, his words clipped more than usual, but the real tell that something serious had happened was that he didn't bang his gavel - just kept clutching it in his hands. Never before had Kurt seen him bring a meeting to order without rapping the damned thing on the table just because he enjoyed the power it brought. Even when the Warblers were quiet enough to begin the meeting, he still used the gavel.  
  
Of course, Kurt had never heard them quite  _this_  quiet.  
  
"As all of you are aware, as the winners of Regionals last Saturday-" No one smiled. Kurt couldn't stop grinning at the memory and no one else looked even remotely happy about it. What in the world-   
  
Had someone complained? Had someone realized what he and Blaine were-...oh dear god, someone had figured it out, hadn't they? They knew and now everyone-  
  
...Only no one was staring at him. If they thought it was his fault, wouldn't they either be staring at him or looking at each other and away from him? Something like that?  
  
"-we have been given a place at Nationals, which are being held this year the weekend after Memorial Day in Baltimore, Maryland. However-" Wes paused, hesitated, as though he weren't sure how to even begin to phrase whatever was wrong.  
  
Kurt had never seen Wes at a loss for words before. Wes always knew what to say, how to control the group of boys who, while more mature than the public school teenagers Kurt was used to, still had a tendency to want to talk instead of listen especially after a long day of classes. Wes always knew not only what to say, but what historical rationale he could give for his actions. He had a precedent for everything, always delivered in a moved voice that made it sound as though he had personally witnessed all events in Warbler history.  
  
Wes didn't have a precedent for this. Whatever  _this_  was.  
  
Kurt swallowed hard and perched himself on the arm of the couch, the only available space. Hands on his knees, he sat straight and waited for the explanation - to know what it was that had Wes so unable to process and advise.  
  
"as it seems most of you already know, as Councilmember David has uncovered this weekend..." Kurt couldn't help but notice David's uncomfortable shift, the way his shoulders tensed first to one side, then the other. "...Both the hall where the competition would be hosted and all nearby hotels are segregated. Which means we have decisions to make."  
  
* * * * *  
When the meeting broke up, Blaine made his way to the door as quickly as he could without attracting attention to himself. The last thing he wanted to do was have anyone asking him what was wrong.  
  
As if they didn't all know what was wrong. As if it wasn't bothering all of them, just-...  
  
It was personal. It was personal for so many reasons that he couldn't get into with anyone.   
  
"Blaine-"  
  
Especially Kurt.  
  
The stunning brunette walked toward him with quick, poised steps with an expression that was equal parts "How dare they?" and "I want to talk," which Blaine suspected meant that what Kurt really wanted to do was talk about how unfair it all was. And he was right, of course, but the problem was-  
  
The problem was, what good would any of that do? A bunch of boys in a school that dated back to before the beginning of the country, talking about injustice when there was not a single thing any of them could do. They could talk all they wanted about ignorance and prejudice, but the bottom line was-  
  
The bottom line was that his father had been right all this time, hadn't he?  
  
"I don't want to do this now," he said quietly, looking Kurt in the eye. "Can we please not do this?"  
  
Kurt looked taken aback for a moment, but he covered it quickly with a narrow-eyed peering look as he tried to stare past Blaine's masks to the heart of the matter; Blaine managed not to shift uncomfortably, but only just. "Let's go to the dorms," he suggested.  
  
A few days ago, he would have jumped at that. A few days ago, he would have practically dragged Kurt there, hand-in-hand, barely repressing a beam until they were alone and he could let his guard down, spread out on his bed with this amazing boy. A few days ago, 'Let's go to the dorms' would have ended with at least some clothing being shifted dramatically, if not removed, and that would have felt good-  
  
A few days ago it would have felt good. Now it felt felonious.  
  
Now it  _was_  felonious.   
  
But at the same time...at the same time being around Kurt was the only time he'd been able to feel truly good in years, and the past few months had been so amazing, and if he could just get that back. If he could somehow forget the information he'd learned over the course of the weekend and go back to something simpler, go back to thinking that maybe, just maybe-  
  
He nodded and let Kurt lead the way to his room. Blaine paused a moment to fumble for the key, unable to even look at Kurt properly until they were inside, safe behind the thick wooden door. "Are you okay?" Kurt asked immediately, and Blaine looked away. He should have known that would be the first question, but somehow no answer would come. "Obviously what's going on is horrible, but you look worse than-"  
  
"I'm included," he blurted out, and Kurt stared at him. That hadn't been what he'd wanted to say, when he put it that way it sounded so  _selfish_ , as if the only reason he cared about what was going on was because it impacted him personally. But in the privacy of his room, away from all the people who had no idea that more than Wes, David, Jerry, and Jim were effected by it, standing across from the boy who knew every last one of his secrets, he finally spoke aloud the words that had been vibrating through him since he'd spent too much time in the library the previous afternoon.  
  
"What?" Kurt asked.   
  
He tried to speak and couldn't find the words, let out a quiet sigh, and tried again. "The laws there are worse than Ohio's. It isn't just coloured-" God he hated that word "-and white. It spells out everyone separately, and that..." He shook his head and half-rolled his eyes because it felt so ridiculous to say it. He couldn't even be mad because it seemed to ludicrous. "...that includes me. The law lists white, Negro, Asian and  _Malay_. Even if we were allowed to go as a group to the convention hall but had to stay in separate hotels, I would have to stay in a separate one from everyone else - there are laws that prohibit not only marriages with whites, but with blacks or Asians, I-...they actually thought far ahead enough to make sure that didn't happen." His parents' marriage was hardly something he was eager to emulate, but the knowledge that it would be illegal if they had lived in Maryland at the time...if his father had gone to Johns Hopkins University for his psychiatric training instead of staying in New England...  
  
He wanted to lock his dorm room and never come out, he wanted to scrub his skin until the frustrating but generally harmless hint of olive pigmentation pinked up more than Kurt's frustratingly rosy cheeks. He wanted to blend in, he wanted to-  
  
...to do everything he'd thought his father was crazy for doing all these years.  
  
And he hated that.  
  
Kurt looked outraged on his behalf, but that didn't help anything. It almost made him feel worse.   
  
"I can't marry anyone in Maryland except-"  
  
"You can't marry me regardless," Kurt pointed out with a cheeky grin, as if he were trying to cheer Blaine up with his horrible awkward jokes, and it didn't work. Not at all.  
  
"I can't marry Jean, either."  
  
The room went still at the mention of the long-unspoken name. He hadn't seen her since Kurt told him to choose, but she still represented a particular type of safety. A fallback of sorts, a...a what-if. What if Kurt was wrong about all this? What if things weren't as simple as he wanted them to be?  
  
He'd spent most of last night wondering if it would be wrong to call her again after a few months of not speaking. It was only after her curfew had passed anyway that he had made up his mind.  
  
"Blaine-"  
  
"Don't," he said quietly, backing away as Kurt reached out to touch his arm.   
  
He wanted the touch too much. He wanted to pull him onto the bed and touch him everywhere because hadn't that worked before when he'd felt disgusting? Hadn't that worked...except for the time it hadn't, but that wasn't the point.   
  
"It's a felony."  
  
Kurt looked more confused than ever. "Marrying-"  
  
"No," he stated, finally meeting Kurt's eyes. "Us. What we did. What I want to do to you. All of it. It's a felony. I-in Baltimore, it's ten years in jail and a fine."  
  
He'd never contemplated that part before. He knew about the illness part, he knew about the social part, but that...how had he never known  _that_?  
  
Kurt stared at him for a long moment before finally saying simply, "Okay."  
  
"Okay?" Blaine demanded. How in the world could Kurt be so calm about all of this?   
  
"So we don't do that in Maryland. We can't stay at the same hotel anyway, I doubt it will be a problem," he added bitterly.  
  
Blaine stared at him, incredulous. "It's no different here," he pointed out. "Or anywhere else. I looked - it's illegal everywhere. There's not a single place in this country it's legal. Nowhere at all." His fists clenched at his sides in frustration as he added, "Including New York."  
  
That had been the one that took his breath away when he found it. New York was supposed to be the exception, it was supposed to be different. That was supposed to be their place where they could be together - it was meant to be a free zone. A place for them, wasn't that what they'd sung? Wasn't that what Kurt had sold him on weeks ago? The only reason he'd thought they might be okay to...to be them.   
  
Kurt had said there were other places out there where they'd be safe. That there were places outside his room where they didn't have to worry so much. Cities, he'd said, near the coast. What was Baltimore if not that?   
  
What would make New York any different?  
  
He wished he had never looked, but it was too late now. He wished he had never gone searching, but after David came back from the library looking so angry and telling all the Warblers he could find about their dilemma he thought...he'd thought maybe David was wrong. Not deliberately, of course, but maybe he was misunderstanding it. David was far more inclined in maths and sciences than in history and law, and he looked so clouded by anger, and maybe...maybe there was something else in the library that would help. Maybe there was the equivalent of the report, or maybe the book was old, or something- Maryland was called the Free State, he'd thought surely something about what David had found had to be wrong, and then it just...  
  
...it wasn't wrong.  
  
Six months ago he would have believed it, given David a consolatory clap on the shoulder, and gone on his way. He would have accepted that sometimes ignorant people were prejudiced and things would change slowly but surely and there wasn't much of anything he could do about it. But then Kurt had come along with his need to stand up for what was right and his-  
  
-his damned  _dreams_ , and his hope, and his optimism and the need to impart those onto others in a way that made it hurt so much more...  
  
Kurt paused at the mention of New York, but he recovered quickly. "I doubt that's right," he stated in a voice that made clear he had no doubt in his doubt: he flat-out believed that was wrong. "I'll ask Leroy about it. I know he talked about California, and while he was thin on the details I get the impression they were doing a lot more than we've done, and if you're saying that even California has one of these laws...that can't be right."  
  
The thing was, he still wanted to believe Kurt. He wanted to believe that this was just a misunderstanding of what the law said, or a typographical error, or a strange overinclusion in a seldom-read text. He wanted to be able to crawl back into the world Kurt had painted for them both, the one where they lived in a beautiful apartment and listened to Broadway albums and held each other all night, but it felt more and more like a fantasy than a future.  
  
How could that world exist when everything in it was illegal?   
  
Kurt spoke as though as soon as they got out of Ohio everything would be better, because the problem was with where they were. The problem was with their backwards, ignorant, bigoted state and its insistence on hating everything that was uncommon or new. But what if Ohio wasn't even the worst place they could be? After all, at least in Ohio his parents could be married - as unhappy as they were, they weren't committing a crime. At the time he was born, had they been in Maryland, his mother would have been guilty of a felony for bearing the child of a coloured man - and out of wedlock, no less, because they couldn't-  
  
He wondered if that would have sped up her nervous breakdown even faster, or if she would've just decided not to bother in the first place.  
  
He wondered if his father would be even more paranoid if they lived somewhere else, or if he would've been forced to deal with it all earlier.   
  
He wondered if his father had picked Ohio deliberately, if he'd grown up as a poor and ostracized child and dreamed of one day finding a place where he could be accepted as one of the normal people the way Kurt dreamed of New York. Maybe this was the closest they were going to get to utopia. Maybe everything else out there was worse.   
  
"They never got their place," Blaine said quietly, and Kurt stopped midway through his babbled justification of why the law must not actually say what Blaine thought he'd seen.   
  
"What?"  
  
"Tony and Maria."  
  
Kurt looked stricken for a moment, then looked at Blaine with pleading eyes as if he wanted to beg for Blaine to take it back, to say he didn't mean that, to-...to  _something_  neither of them could give words to. "They're fictional, Blaine," he stated in a tight, even tone.  
  
Funny; last week Kurt hadn't been so keen to point that part out. A week ago they had held onto the idea of the song like a liferaft.  
  
Now he felt like he was slipping off and plunging headlong into the freezing cold waters of reality.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The Warblers reconvened on Tuesday after class to vote on what to do. That had been Wes's idea, to allow everyone the opportunity to think about the options and mull over any questions they might have before ultimately casting their vote. It was a lot to give up, he had pointed out numbly, though Kurt wasn't sure whether Wes meant by attending Nationals or by forfeiting. On one hand, the Warblers hadn't performed in a national championship since 1914 when the Whiffenpoofs came down with food poisoning from the later-defunct hotdog stand at Coney Island, thereby allowing alternate-qualifier Warblers to compete in the then-all-grade acapella competition. On the other... No one had voiced the other side of things yet. No one had said much of anything at the meeting on Monday as they all spent a lot of time staring at furniture and avoiding looking at any of the coloured Warblers.  
  
But twenty-four hours to cool off seemed to have done people a little good. Instead of the intensely empty stares, the shell-shocked expressions, the brows lowered in confusion, the Warblers looked and sounded a lot more normal. Even Wes, for whom the news had seemed to be a blow so sudden and downright shocking that he had struggled to find the correct date during one of his anecdotes on Monday, looked better. He was perhaps a bit too uptight, which was firmly in-character.  
  
Blaine strode in, full of confidence and bravado, every ounce of it fake. He took a seat as far away from Kurt as he could get, in a position to look mostly at the Council and take his cues from them. Kurt started to gather his things to move closer, but Bill entered and happened to take the closest seat, then Jim took the seat with the best view of Blaine's eyes. With a quiet sigh of defeat, Kurt settled back into his original place and crossed his legs delicately as Wes gaveled the meeting to order.  
  
Things really were back to normal.  
  
"This special meeting will come to order," Wes stated. "Are there any motions at this time?"  
  
Kurt had been in the group long enough to know what options that meant. A person could move for speeches, which meant at least one for and one against. When there had been a motion for speeches once on the question of changing the official Warbler uniform footwear from loafers to wingtips, the speeches had lasted nearly two hours - and Kurt was not ashamed to state he had spoken the longest on the subject of the wingtips' classic styling and versatility. Someone could move for a vote, which would end the meeting quickly. They could move to discuss something else entirely, but it didn't seem like anyone was eager to do that.  
  
When no one's hand raised, Wes simply nodded. "Seeing none, then."   
  
Still no one spoke. No hands raised. Kurt had never seen the Warblers not engage in  _some_  kind of spirited discussion over what they should or shouldn't do whenever it was the unconventional choice. They had nearly torn Blaine's head off when he had suggested changing the tie, and when Bill had posed the question of snaps rather than merely claps during one number the room had nearly exploded so fast Kurt wanted to seek out the nearest desk to assume the nuclear drill position.   
  
After a moment without anyone jumping in, Wes demanded, "Do any of you have anything to say?"  
  
"I think we'd be preaching to the choir," Rick suggested. When Wes raised an irritated eyebrow, Rick added, "Oh, fine. I move to vote on the question of Warbler participation at the National Championship in Baltimore, Maryland."  
  
Wes looked pleased by the return to protocol and procedure. Smiling, he asked, "Is there a second?" A few hands went up, and David nodded in Nick's direction to indicate that was the one he had officially recorded. "Any opposition?" No hands raised, and Wes nodded. "In the interest of fairness, the Council has decided amongst itself that we will abstain from the vote."  
  
For the first time, there was a stir amongst the Warblers. The Council wasn't voting? They always voted, even on routine matters, even as David had to count the votes and raise his hand to make clear which way he was voting lest anyone want to challenge the final numbers. Or if they abstained it was on an independent basis because one member or another didn't care about an issue, like Thad's insistence that he would defer to Blaine's song selection and didn't feel right voting one way or the other (and really, were they sure Thad wasn't also one of them? Kurt wondered). But this was different. This  _felt_  different.  
  
Kurt raised his hand high and Wes pointed at him with the gavel. "Junior Warbler Kurt Hummel."  
  
"Why?" he asked simply.  
  
"Excuse me?"  
  
"Why is the Council abstaining?"  
  
Wes and David cast looks at each other, and Kurt wondered for a moment if Thad had even been involved in the decision. Maybe they had outvoted him. Was the Council allowed to do that? "In the interest of fairness and to avoid the appearance of undue influence," Wes replied evenly.  
  
"What kind of undue influence would you have in this as opposed to..." Before he could finish the sentence with 'every other matter' and avoid rolling his eyes at the thought of how tight of control Wes kept on the group, he had a thought.  
  
There were five Warblers who would be personally impacted by this, only four of whom did anyone know about. If Wes and David didn't vote, thereby cutting in half the number of people at issue in all of this...were they concerned that the guilt that these inclusive, enlightened boys might feel if they voted in their own interest instead of with their friends-  
  
"You should," Kurt stated as he stood.  
  
"Warbler Kurt-"  
  
"You should vote. The entire point of this is taking away your voice, isn't it? If we go, then that's what it does - take out the members of the group who have been deemed unacceptable by the so-called 'Free State'." Would they even know how to compete without Blaine as a soloist? Would Blaine even tell anyone about it? Because he could pass for white, certainly in Ohio - would it be different in Baltimore, he wondered? Was that part of Blaine's concern, that people in Maryland would be able to tell he didn't belong in a particular place? It wasn't as though he had a big M printed on his drivers license for Malay, would he try and pretend the way he did with Jean? Assume that if no one was any the wiser-  
  
He tried to catch Blaine's eye, but his boyfriend consciously kept his gaze away, fascinating himself instead with the edge of the Council's table.  
  
"Warbler Kurt. While the Council appreciates your input, this particular sub-question doesn't impact you," Wes stated, his words clipped and irritated.   
  
Of course it impacted him, Kurt thought angrily, and he wanted to say so. He wanted to say that it was incredibly personal to him - he had only ended up here in the first place because of segregation and it had followed him here anyway. He had a boyfriend who couldn't even look at him because he was so angry and ashamed and scared. Of course it impacted him - anything that impacted Blaine impacted him now. Anything that made Blaine seem so defeated and made him lose hope in  _their future together_  had a direct tie to his life, and he needed to make things right for that reason.  
  
He wanted to go to Nationals. He would love to be a soloist. But the look on Blaine's face was enough that, even if he didn't already believe it was fundamentally wrong to support something like that, even if it weren't for the fact that Mrs. Jones would kill him and he would never be able to look Mercedes in the eye again...he couldn't vote for anything that would contribute to that.  
  
But he couldn't say any of that without giving up each and every one of Blaine's most closely-guarded secrets. Even if he didn't agree with Blaine keeping them, he couldn't do that.   
  
It took an exceptional amount of self-control to sit down instead of snapping back, and he crossed his arms over his chest as he listened to Wes and Thad debate the merits of secret ballot versus their usual show-of-hands. They should all have to show themselves, he thought bitterly. Being nice to a person and secretly campaigning against them was for people like Quinn Fabray, not for the Warblers. Hiding like that-  
  
He almost missed the question being put to a vote, but snapped quickly out of his frustrated near-trance as he saw hands raising.  
  
Every hand raising.  
  
With the exception of the Council, as Kurt looked around, he saw every single hand in the air - even Blaine's.  
  
Wes couldn't quite keep the smile off his face as he glanced around the room, beginning with Blaine and ending with David. "Well," he said, a note of surprise in his tone. "That settles that, then. I will send in our notice of forfeiture tomorrow."   
  
* * * * *  
  
The dorm room was quiet except for the sound of the two of them breathing, each staring up at the ceiling from separate beds, unable to sleep. "Hey, Kurt?" Sam whispered into the darkness.  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"You're awake?"  
  
Kurt fought the urge to roll his eyes. "Did I just answer that?"  
  
"Right," Sam said, hemming and hawing about his next question for a moment before finally asking, "People really care about stuff like this?"  
  
He didn't need to specify what 'stuff' he meant; Nationals was all anyone could think about. If the awkward silence at the Warblers' usual table at dinner was any indication, it would probably be all anyone could think about for awhile. "Yeah," Kurt replied quietly.  
  
How strange it must be, never knowing any of this, he thought. How bizarre to suddenly at 18 be confronted with the fact that people out there in the world cared so deeply about something so ridiculous. How off-putting...  
  
...and yet how wonderful it must be to not have known it this whole time. To not grow up feeling like your entire town hates your best friend and trying to wrap your head around why. He wasn't sure he could imagine it, but it sounded like it would be - while perhaps more jarring for a few days - far less damaging in the longterm.  
  
And he had, after all, struggled far less to understand how he felt than Blaine had because he didn't have any baggage to go along with it. He had never learned to hate it so he didn't need to - unlike Blaine...  
  
Blaine, who would barely look at him right now.  
  
"Was this what it was like? In Lima?"  
  
"Oh, no. Definitely not." His answer was automatic, but it took another moment of thought to provide a reason. "At McKinley, there wouldn't have been a vote," he explained quietly, his voice even. "We would have just gone because I would have been the only one who stood up for Mercedes."  
  
Mr. Schue would have made it sound like he was giving them a choice, but he wasn't good at controlling the room when they got going. Rachel would start in about how she shouldn't be deprived of the right to express herself at Nationals just because people weren't enlightened, and Quinn would jump in and glare at Sandy the whole time, as if to say 'Don't forget what we all think of  _you_ , too,' and Puck would look vaguely uncomfortable and might jump in a little because he seemed to get it - if the dinner at Breadstix in October had been any indication - but when it came down to it, it would have been him against the rest of the group and Mr. Schue would have looked at him and metaphorically washed his hands of it all. "Sorry, Kurt, looks like the group has spoken."  
  
He would have quit in protest, and he and Mercedes would have spent the weekend going to the nickel theater to watch horrible old movies. His dad would have given Finn his 'I'm so disappointed in you' look for a week, and that would have been mildly reassuring, but that would have been the end of it.  
  
If Sam had been there, Kurt suspected, they might have at least had two people. ...If Blaine had been there, they wouldn't have had another voice because Blaine would've stepped back the way he was right now.  
  
He wanted to believe that wasn't true, that it was just a matter of shock. Being slapped in the face with being different after you've spent your entire life trying to blend in...that had to be hard for him, Kurt supposed. But at the same time, it scared him how scared Blaine seemed to be by it all. It reeked of the way Blaine had been before, and that...  
  
...there was no way that would end, well.  
  
"That's really rotten," Sam replied, sounding disgusted and angry at even the idea of it.  
  
Kurt wished he could be angry. Instead he felt tired. "Yeah," he replied simply. All if it was rotten, the whole situation. No part of it was right.  
  
Except for the part where he had seen every single hand in that room go up when asked who thought they should boycott the event. Seniors who were trying to get into music programs at prestigious schools, transfer students who had never been part of a winning team before, it didn't matter - every single boy had voted to stand with their teammates...because they weren't just teammates, they were friends.  
  
The fact that such a thing could happen anywhere in Ohio meant there had to be safe places out there somewhere. He understood why Blaine couldn't see that right now, but Dalton's existence alone was proof enough that better things were out there. A year ago he could never have imagined being in a place where kids would stand up for their fellow students to be outraged over segregation, and then he'd found this place. There was no reason that this setback changed the future: New York was still what they had envisioned.  
  
He would wait a few days and try again, Kurt resolved. Blaine was entitled to feel attacked and ashamed by it all, but in a few days he might be a little less sore about the gross injustice that he could listen to reason...and hope.


	32. Chapter 32

Blaine didn't even know what he was supposed to be doing anymore.

The statement of frustrated near-despondence was more than a passing thought as he stared at the seemingly-endless pile of work to be done. Instead it was a thought that seemed to lurk beneath every broader topic, a kind of cynical hopelessness bubbling up every so often whenever it felt like something was expected of him.

When the Warblers talked about what they should be working on for the rest of the year, and Blaine's mind turned to the momentary promise of competing at Nationals. That had been a solid goal to work toward, something concrete with a date that they could prepare for rather than the sort of general "We should practice something" feel that had taken over the meetings of late. They had a few minor performances coming up around campus, but for the most part they were on a mini-vacation until the year-end festivities began to ramp up again in a few weeks. Then there would be grad night and graduation and probably a few parting serenades, but it all felt distant and unchallenging. The exuberance that had been there before whenever the Warblers talked about performing around campus was gone, dampened by the knowledge that what they thought was so simple - a bunch of boys singing together - was actually frowned-upon in so many other places.

He still wasn't sure why it hadn't occurred to him to look. He knew David had family far enough away that anything south of the Mason-Dixon line warranted a glance, but he...he should have known, right? He had grown up with his father's paranoia and obsessive attempts at blending in, he should have known that the man was trying to protect himself from something. Otherwise it would just be a mental illness, wouldn't it? And he did remember the comments people made at his old school, but somehow...somehow being around Kurt had made so much of his own guardedness dissipate in a way he didn't realize until it was long gone - like not realizing how much you've grown until you see photographs from last summer. 

What were the Warblers meant to be doing? How were they supposed to go back to merrily doo-wopping along to popular hits when it felt like everything they unintentionally represented was under attack?

And that wasn't the only problem. With the impending end of the year came so many decisions to be made, so many potential avenues-

Staring at the stack of college materials on his desk, the choice seemed impossible. How was he supposed to plan out his entire future when it felt like the past few months had changed something so fundamental in him that he couldn't imagine where the next few months would leave him? How could he be expected to know what was right for him when everything felt so impossible?

How should he know where would be best for him when it felt like nowhere was safe? Going to college in his dorm room at Dalton didn't seem like a viable option, and the drive-in didn't sound much better. For all Kurt had talked about New York, there was no guarantee that it would actually be any better there. Not when everything that was illegal in Ohio was just as illegal in New York. Not when they still couldn't live any differently there than they did here, when everyone would still think they were wrong. 

The acceptance letter from Columbia stared up at him like a challenge: risk it? Play it safe? 

What was safe anymore? He didn't even know. 

He heard a knock at the door that he knew came from Kurt - the boy had a very distinctive rap, authoritative and yet not demanding - and he slipped the four acceptance packages back into his drawer before he stood. As he opened the door, Kurt looked so enthusiastic it was almost painful. Clutching a flier in both hands, he practically bounced into the room and closed the door behind him, then looked at Blaine as if to say, "Ask me why I'm so happy right now."

Blaine saw little choice. "What's that?" he asked, indicating the flier as Kurt perched on the edge of the bed.

"We have a spring formal coming up," he stated proudly.

"Right," Blaine replied. He knew they did - they had one every year. He had been to most of them by minor force and extreme peer pressure, so he didn't understand why Kurt was so excited about the prospect of spending an entire evening surrounded by Warblers in ill-fitting tuxedos trying to show off enough to entice their dates - girls culled from a variety of sister schools, town hangouts, and cousins - to make out with them behind the social hall. 

Maybe Kurt was planning to finally put into action his longstanding grand plan for social etiquette classes for the boys who weren't used to seeing girls more than twice a year. Maybe the light in his eyes was put there by dollar signs. Blaine couldn't blame him; the way some of the guys acted, there were high profits to be made if Kurt could tolerate them long enough to change their ways. 

He, on the other hand, would fake as much enthusiasm as he possibly could while wishing the Warblers were performing instead of the band; at least then he would have the chance to express himself during the dance and feel a little less like he was suffocating as he tried to blend into the crowd, fade into the background. It was never easy when one went stag - suddenly boys were trying to walk a fine line between tossing their dates his way out of sympathy and keep their dates for themselves because who knew when they would have the opportunity to go out with a girl again? In either event, it made him all the more conspicuous.

He wondered if Jean-

He probably couldn't just call her up and ask her to go to a dance with him, could he? Not when they hadn't been out together in four months and hadn't spoken much in the interim. But taking a girl was definitely the only way to avoid drawing unwanted attention.

"Why aren't you excited?"

Blaine wasn't sure why he would be. "It's just a dance, Kurt."

"What about dances, Blaine?" Kurt sounded irritated by the flippant response.

"They're just...not that much fun is all," he replied. The way Kurt looked at him, eyes narrowed and trained on him fiercely, Blaine was struck by sudden fear.

Did Kurt want them to go-

No. For all his insistence that things weren't nearly as bad as Blaine knew they were, Kurt still had to have more self-preservation instinct than that. Surely. Surely he couldn't be foolish enough to think they could go together. 

"I wouldn't know," Kurt replied. "I never got to go to mine."

"Really?"

"Who would I go with? Rachel was either trying to get Finn's attention, or last year she was dating Jesse before he broke her heart in a million pieces. And Mercedes was never allowed to set foot on the school grounds before. I usually helped a few girls select their dresses, helped a few boys coordinate their ensembles to their dates', then Mercedes and I would grab dinner and spend all evening as the only people in the movie theater. It was a nice ritual, but I thought this year might be better," he said, holding up the flier again as if to say 'exhibit A.'

But his question about who to go with did not make Blaine less uneasy. 

"You...don't mean going with me, right?" Blaine asked.

Kurt stared at him. "Don't be ridiculous, Blaine. Even if you are my boyfriend, two boys can't go to a dance together," he stated as though it were the most insane thing he had ever heard, but his eyes were wistful. It didn't take an expert to know Kurt wished things were different...but at least he understood, Blaine consoled himself. At least Kurt understood the way things had to be. 

"So I'll take Rachel," Kurt said with a fake brightness, clapping his hands together. "On the up-side, it does mean I'll get full outfit approval rights. She can look fantastic, it just requires praying the plaid from her cold, dead hands and forcing her into a hairstyle that doesn't make her look seven."

"You shouldn't be so hard on her all the time, you know, she's not so bad."

Kurt cocked his head, regarding Blaine carefully as though trying to figure out where the statement had come from. "I know that," he replied. "I've known that for longer than you have. She's eccentric and occasionally irritating, but she's also a good friend and better at keeping secrets than I feared. We're allowed to give each other a hard time."

"I'm just saying, you put her down a lot, and if you're dating her you shouldn't-"

"We're not really dating, Blaine, the regular rules don't apply." When Blaine didn't have anything to say to that, Kurt's face softened a little as he continued to lay out the plan. "We'll drive over to Lima to pick them up that Saturday afternoon. I'm not sure exactly what we'll do afterward, because driving to and from Lima twice in one night isn't exactly my idea of a good time and it's a pretty long trip back after the dance is over, but maybe if we spend the night at my house and get a start back Sunday morning-"

"Pick them up?" Blaine asked, cutting off Kurt's lengthy train of thought as he planned the entire weekend aloud.

"Hm?"

"You said we would go to Lima to pick them up?"

"Rachel and Mercedes," Kurt replied like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Anyway. It will mean dodging out of Sunday church and brunch, but that's nothing I haven't done before so we could be back here by-"

"I'm taking Mercedes?"

"Yes." Kurt looked at him with confusion, not sure why that was even a question. "Why? Who else would you take?" 

It was a loaded question if ever Blaine saw one, and he knew what Kurt was waiting for: the name Jean to creep into the conversation. Or, for that matter, the name of any other girl he hadn't heard of before because that would clearly be a sign of something going on. Because if Blaine wanted to take a girl to be able to blend in, if he wanted to retain the ability to not attract attention, if he wanted to just feel normal for one night instead of thinking about all the ways people outside Dalton hated his mere existence, then clearly that was wrong. How dare he?

He took the simpler road. " Why can't you take Mercedes? She's your best friend."

"What's wrong with Mercedes?" Kurt asked defensively, and Blaine had to remind himself that it was probably just a reflex.

"Nothing," he replied honestly, raising his hands in a symbol of surrender. "But I've only met her once, and you've known her forever. I know Rachel a lot better, and I like her - I like her more than you do."

Kurt shook his head. "She's my fake girlfriend, get your own," he stated, then stopped. The change was barely perceptible - a tightening in his jaw, a slight narrowing in his eyes, a stiffness in his shoulders, his head tilting just to one side as he asked, "You like her, don't you?"

"I just said-"

"No, I mean...you want to take Rachel because you like her."

He didn't, but he might. He might, given time, and if he were going to be attracted to any girl she was probably the closest to his type, and she had an appreciation for music that surpassed that of any other girl he'd met including Jean, and she was ambitious which he could appreciate. She was quirky in a way he found adorable even when it was strange, and more importantly-

...if his first choice was unacceptable, she was a reasonable facsimile to be his second choice.

Because if New York didn't pan out, if it wasn't everything Kurt swore up and down it was going to be - the way he said that cities along the coasts were safe for them and it turned out they weren't...if the vision Kurt kept trying to paint for him that seemed to grow dimmer and less probable by the day was, in fact, merely an illusion that Kurt had talked himself into the same way he was trying to talk Blaine into it...

He needed a backup plan. 

He didn't know why Kurt didn't understand that. Or maybe Kurt did understand the need for a backup plan but was in denial. He didn't know - to be entirely honest, he didn't care what the difference was. In either event, it meant that he was left staring at alternatives while Kurt tried to blithely swipe them off the table and tell him that if he just believed a little harder, it would be true. If he just pictured the lights of New York a little brighter, just envisioned the future a little warmer, just wished and hoped and closed his eyes and flew to Neverland, then he wouldn't have to ever grow up and take responsibility.

Whether he liked it or not, one day he was going to have to grow up. He would have to grow up and-...and give up music, and give up boys, and...at least Rachel would understand if it took him a little bit of an adjustment period. She would be going through an adjustment of her own, probably, when she was forced to grow up and abandon the Great White Way the way everyone had to.

Kurt stared at him as though there was something wrong with him for not being able to immediately deny that he liked Rachel, and it was the most repulsive he had felt in a long time. But what right did Kurt have to make him feel that way, anyway? Considering the naive fantasyland he inhabited, did he really get to cast stones just because Blaine lived in the real world and understood what was going to happen in the future?

He wished Kurt could be right, but he wasn't. Kurt was like one of those governors who stood on the front steps of a school as integration happened around them, convinced that if he just sang Dixie long enough and loud enough, the world would change into what he wanted it to be...only in this case Kurt stood on the steps of something crumbling and envisioned it rebuilt and resplendent, a glorious palace where only a worn-down pre-war brick facade remained.

He gave a small shrug, a flick of the eyebrows, and replied, "Maybe."

Kurt stood and stormed out. Blaine couldn't help but notice the way he clutched the flier to his chest, as though he was desperately trying to hold onto the image he had of what the dance could be; the fact that it would be nothing like that in reality...Kurt would never let himself acknowledge that. Blaine wasn't sure if it was more cruel to force him to face reality now, or to let something else jolt him into reality later.

He didn't know what he was supposed to be doing anymore.

* * * * *

Kurt could feel Blaine slipping away.

He couldn't put his finger on specifics for the most part. It was a lot of subtle things, a lot of what felt like a change but might have been nothing. For instance, maybe it just felt like Blaine was more tense than he used to be. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe they were mutually more tense because there were finals coming up before very long, and that was the reason that most of their conversations felt so much more awkward.

But that didn't explain the way Blaine got so quiet around him now. Had they always been like this? Kurt swore they used to chatter on about everything under the sun...but maybe that had just been exaggerated in his memory. After all, that made it seem like they couldn't be silent together with one another, and that wasn't the case. He knew there had been times they just laid together, listening to music on Blaine's bed, curled together and touching but not doing anything overtly sexual...they were silent then, and it was comfortable. Now it felt like two people i the same room who were trying to avoid each other.

It used to feel good, right? It used to feel amazing?

And then the idea of Blaine saying maybe he liked Rachel- he didn't. That much was obvious. He was scared. He was afraid because he had thought for some reason that Baltimore was supposed to represent hope or something - Kurt didn't know why, of all the cities in the world he would never have selected Baltimore as an indicator of class, culture, or tolerance, but in any event...Blaine was upset over Nationals. He didn't actually like Rachel, he liked the idea of things being easy. He liked the idea of feeling normal: that had been Blaine's modus operandi for the entire time Kurt had known him. He didn't want anyone to know his family background, he was terrified of anyone finding out his secret attractions, he didn't want anyone to know anything about him that might mean he wasn't the picture perfect everything.

But Kurt had something stronger on his side. He had truth. He had love. And once Blaine realized that there was absolutely no chemistry with Rachel - and there could never be because Rachel was a girl and Blaine was a homosexual - it would be like Jean. Once Blaine knew what his options were, he would pick Kurt just like he had picked him over Jean, who had been perfectly nice enough but not what Blaine needed.

The problem was getting to a point where it felt like that was a reasonable choice to make.

Blaine wasn't going to retain his belief in their glorious future together if he felt like everything was as tense and terse as Kurt felt like they were. They needed to get back to a good place first. They needed to stop feeling quite so...hopeless with one another. 

Relationships were about hope, not about fear. He just needed to make sure Blaine could remember that. This was a setback, but not a fatal one.

He hoped, at least.

No - not hoped. He knew. He knew himself, he knew Blaine, he knew the two of them together. There was no one else he would rather be with, rather be around, than Blaine. And he knew that Blaine felt similarly. 

He just needed to remind Blaine of that.

All it would take was one good date, he was sure of it. One good date night, one night where they could relax and Blaine could let himself believe again...because he had believed it at one point. Kurt thought so, at least - if Blaine hadn't actually believed it in the first place, then his beliefs couldn't very well have been shaken like this, could they? A loss of faith required faith in the first place. If he had gotten Blaine to believe in their future once, surely he could do it again by bringing them back to that place...

That was it. That was the answer.

There had been two places they had ever been able to be completely themselves together: Blaine's room, which of late hadn't been much help, and the drive-in. That's where they could go. Blaine would feel safe there, they would see other people like them, and that would be enough. In an ideal world, he would ask Rachel to set up dinner for them with her dad and Leroy again, but considering he wanted Blaine and Rachel to have as little time together as possible right now that didn't seem like the best option. But the drive-in...

Quite pleased with himself, he strode toward the senior dorms. At the sign-in desk, where copies of both the local paper and the Columbus Post-Dispatch resided daily for students to keep up with current events, Kurt paused long enough to snag the poorly-refolded copy of the Post-Dispatch; the drive-in wasn't close enough to Westerville to print movie times there. Someone had been reading the sports section last, he knew, because that was what stared up at him. How could these boys, Kurt wondered, many of whom would be attending Ivy League universities in the fall, be unable to handle something as simple as refolding a newspaper correctly. Honestly. He really should think about teaching etiquette classes; it was a little late for this year, but he supposed that were he to find a suitable location somewhere between Lima and Dalton it wouldn't be a horrible way to earn money after school or on the weekends. And there were plenty of all-boys schools in the area, he knew that much from the selection process last summer. The Kurt Hummel Academy for Young Men in Training - he liked the sound of that. He and Blaine could talk about it on their date, since Blaine had at one point had an aversion to his discussing anything of the kind where people might hear them.

See? he reminded himself. There had been times they were worse together than they were now. At Sectionals, when Blaine had outright shushed him and told him to stop talking about understanding what girls liked in potential dates in public...that had been far more tense than they were now. He had nothing to worry about. They were fine, this was just a minor stumbling block.

Blaine answered the door after he rapped twice. "Kurt."

"Hey," he replied, smiling. Blaine stepped back automatically to allow him in as if by habit rather than out of a desire to actually have him inside, but Kurt didn't care. He would be able to fix this. The Bill Haley record playing in the background was unusual but not unprecedented - Blaine's taste in music was eclectic, certainly, and usually when the singer was female it was Kurt's doing (with Judy Garland or any soundtrack being a noted exception).

Now he was reading into Blaine's music choice to do homework. This was what the tension was doing to him, it was making him crazy. But that would all be fine after Friday.

"We're going out this weekend," he stated as he perched on Blaine's desk chair.

"We are?"

"Yes," Kurt replied, brandishing the paper for a moment before he set to refolding it the right way. "Things have been strained lately, and I understand - you've been worried. You were blindsided by what happened with Nationals, and I can appreciate that. But what we need to do isn't to slow things down - we just need to take time together. So we'll go out this weekend - to the drive-in."

Blaine's smile was faint, hesitant, but genuine. "What's playing?" he asked, moving to look over Kurt's shoulder.

"That's what I'm trying to look up now," he stated as he finally realigned the sections to their proper order. "Maybe it'll be another Judy Garland - I'm in the mood for Meet Me in St. Lou-"

The drive-in showtimes were usually in the Arts and Entertainment section, after the Sports but before the circulars, sometimes shoved onto a back page next to advertisements for the automat downtown. It was generally a small box, as the place was small and out of the way and didn't bring in the kind of money or traffic to warrant a large splashy ad like the one near Polaris always ran. It often took Kurt - or Sam, whoever was looking for it - a few minutes to find the listing.

Which was why the last place Kurt ever expected to see their drive-in was on the front page.

17 Perverts Nabbed in Crackdown

It felt for a moment like he couldn't breathe. That-...that had to be a mistake, right? There was on way that-...that something like happened at the bar in Columbus would happen there, could it? Bars were places people could get rowdy, it was somewhere that a person might be considered disorderly and therefore have cause to be arrested - he had seen more than his share of local drunks outside one of the bars in Lima too late on a Sunday or too early on a Friday, arguing and being belligerent with officers. But no one so much as spoke to anyone else at the drive-in. He had never seen anyone else exchange even a few words, it was all glances and nods and smiles. What in the world could they be arresting people for?

The sub-headline wasn't much better: Drive-In Hosts Underground Cabal of Immoral Conduct - and the picture beneath it was so surreal. There it was, their drive-in, with the little snack stand they had sent Rachel to so they could have a few minutes alone, the screen flanked by thatches of pine trees, the screen still playing some film in black and white but mostly blocked by the police paddy wagon. A few men were being loaded into it, hands held up to obscure their faces.

That was their place.

Did they know those men? Kurt felt like they should have, they had been there twice and it felt like home and surely they knew some of the homosexuals being arrested-

But it still didn't make any sense. How could something like that happen-

County officers were dispatched to the Pineview Drive-In on Sparrow Road outside Hilliard after receiving a tip that the drive-in was in violation of state liquor laws which prohibit the service of spirits to known or open homosexuals, as well as in violation of a city ordinance which prohibits the gathering of more than three deviants for the purposes of committing a felony. 

When officers arrived, they found nineteen men and four teenagers. The patrons were informed that they were violating the city ordinance, and six of the men left. The remaining seventeen were arrested; of these, six have been charged with lewd conduct in a public place, crimes against nature, and sodomy. Two habitual reoffenders were referred to Belleview for pretrial treatment and detention as is customary for psychopathic offenders. Four were charged with violation of the city ordinance only and have been released from custody; likewise, five were released after proof of identity was established and will not be charged.

 

His hands were quivering by the time he reached the end of the first portion of the article. He needed to turn to page A4, it told him, but he couldn't quite get his fingers to cooperate. 

It could have been them. Any other weekend- It could have so easily been them. They could have been arrested for watching a movie. Nothing more. How was that even possible? 

There had to be an explanation, he knew. There had to be some explanation of what precisely these men had done wrong that meant being arrested. With that in mind, Kurt drew in a deep breath and turned to page A4.

Staring up at him were fourteen mug shots. Fourteen men - no; ten men and four boys his own age - stared back at him, arranged neatly in two lies of five and one line of four, right there in black and white. Beneath each photograph was a name and city, identifying the man and where he was from. Where he lived. Where he could be found and derided and mocked and harassed because now everyone would know his secret.

It could have been them. 

There could have been sixteen photographs, including one that read "Kurt Hummel, Lima", and that-

He looked up at Blaine, needing desperately to know that this wasn't the only place, to remind himself that Ohio was but a holding grounds until they could get somewhere safe; Blaine's face was positively ashen as he stared at the pictures. Kurt knew he was imagining his father seeing a photograph with the name "Blaine Anderson" under it. How the elder Anderson would explain that to his professional colleagues, Kurt could only guess. 

Blaine reached past Kurt's shoulder to point at one photograph: a sullen man in his thirties whose head practically hung even as the picture was taken. He looked ashamed and as though he was trying so hard to disappear it was almost curving his spine. "We saw him," he said quietly. "The first night."

Blaine was right. Glancing across the rows, Kurt pointed to a second man. "This was his lover." The man looked so much younger in the photograph than in the dim light of the parking lot that it was almost comical to see the two pictures near each other. In person it had been obvious they were near the same age as one another, but here...maybe it was because the second man appeared terrified.

More terrified than Kurt appeared, though not by much.

Blaine wanted to be able to say something that would make Kurt feel better. He wanted to be able to reassure him, to say that they would have been lucky. To say that maybe there was a reason they hadn't gone last weekend, some sort of divine protection, but neither of them put much stock in dogmatic explanations. But the truth was...this was exactly what he had been afraid of. This was precisely what had made him fear the first time they had gone to the drive-in, it was what made him nervous going back even though the positive experience with Kurt the first time had been able to override his trepidation. He had known something like this could happen-

And Kurt hadn't.

As blindsided as he had been by the revelations about Baltimore, now Kurt was about their lack of safety at the one place in Ohio that had seemed secure. 

As much as he had wanted Kurt to understand...he hadn't wanted this.

"Come here," he urged Kurt quietly, holding out his hand, and Kurt took it and allowed himself to be led across the room. Lying down, Blaine opened his arms and quickly found Kurt within his embrace.

"I'm sorry," Kurt whispered, shaking his head. "I know it's stupid to-...I thought-..." His voice cracked, and Blaine rubbed his back wishing there was anything he could say. "It was supposed to be safe," he managed finally.

Blaine didn't know how to tell him that nowhere was safe. As much as he wanted to be honest with Kurt, to tell him that this was indicative of everything else as long as they were together, as long as they were what they were-...he couldn't do that. He couldn't hurt the boy worse than he was already aching.

He knew too well how that felt, and he couldn't-

"It's just Ohio," he said quietly, and he felt Kurt nod against his chest. "It's just one stupid place..."

He didn't believe that for a second, but it didn't matter because Kurt did. Kurt sniffed, nodded again, and pulled back to look him in the eye. "This couldn't happen in New York," he stated with the utmost conviction, but it was obvious he was trying to convince himself a little as well. "This...this wouldn't happen there. It couldn't. I was reading - there's an organization there of homosexuals. An entire group with a magazine and meetings and everything. It only happens here because there are too few of us - when we get there? Once we find other people, we'll be safe."

Blaine didn't know how to point out that the problem here wasn't a lack of people - in fact, had it just been the two of them at a drive-in somewhere else, the police wouldn't have been tipped off. And he had no idea where that left him, because if the only way he knew to be safe was to blend in, but it turned out that the more people like one's self were around the more danger it created, how precisely was he supposed to ever find a place?

...To appear normal in a group of other normal people, even if that wasn't how he felt.

"I'll go to the dance with Mercedes," he said quietly, and Kurt stared at him, wondering where the comment had come from.

"Really."

"Yeah," he replied. "It would attract more attention if suddenly I was dating your girlfriend, wouldn't it?"

"Probably. I think only Sam has met her-"

"And a few Warblers at competitions."

"That's right," Kurt acknowledged. She had come over to congratulate him after their duet and insisted on being introduced to any Warblers who happened by. Then she had tried to cajole Kurt into kissing her in public "for appearances' sake"; as far as Blaine could tell from the conversation, despite the fact that they had been dating for more than seven months they had yet to actually kiss. He could only imagine how many arguments that had caused - Rachel was very serious about her acting.

"So we'll go - the four of us," Blaine confirmed. Kurt nodded, looping his arms around Blaine's waist as he leaned in for a quick kiss. That was what was important...whether Blaine believed the rationale or not.


	33. Chapter 33

"You didn't have to come with me, you know," Blaine stated as his hands clutched the steering wheel a little tighter. "I don't even need to go at all, I could have just had Edgar bring it-"

"We've been over this," Kurt replied in a voice that held no frustration but made clear just how serious a topic this was. "You do not simply drop off a tuxedo, though I must admit I am proud that you own one. I'll be spending most of my week working on my ensemble-" He drew out the pronunciation of the word with a deliberate French accent. "-because there is simply nothing available off-the-rack for a young fashionable man in Ohio. But just because you own it doesn't mean the work is done. Oh no. For one thing, I need to see you in it and make sure it doesn't need altering."

"I've worn it before."

Kurt gave him a deadpan look. "Blaine, I've seen you a handful of times not in uniform, and from what little about your style I've been able to cobble together, all I can say is that you tend to be very...low-maintenance when it comes to fashion. You go out to the mall, you buy the first collared shirt you see, you throw on a pair of jeans you've had for years and that's the end of that. And that's fine...for the movies. But for a special occasion, a big night like this, you should trust my fashion judgment."

"The dance isn't for almost two weeks," Blaine pointed out.

"Which is why we're doing this now. I don't know the tailors out here and the last thing we need is for your tux to be ready two days after the dance."

That was a reasonable point. "Still, you didn't need to come along. I could have tried it on for you in my room." Kurt's eyes widened and he blushed, and it took Blaine a moment to realize what he could be thinking. "That wasn't a line, I swear." He wouldn't complain if Kurt used the opportunity to touch him, and the idea of Kurt taking the tux off of him made him breathless, but that hadn't been what he had meant at all.

"I believe you."

It was during moments like this that Blaine forgot things were strained. Little moments like this where Kurt sounded so much like he always had, and he felt comfortable - they felt comfortable. They could tease each other about things that they did that no one could ever know about, and it was like their private joke instead of an oppressive, all-consuming secret that would destroy him if he tried to keep it much longer. 

When it was just the two of them, when things weren't too serious, he could be like he had been. And of course they had to be different when others were around, that had always been the case - and Kurt understood that. He had to. He didn't have to like it, and Kurt had made very clear that he didn't, but that didn't mean they could ignore the reality of their situation. Most of the time, that felt like something he could live with; as much as it hurt to think so hard about who had seen him put his hand on Kurt's and whether they were suspicious or thought he was just a naturally tactile person (which was true), as frustrating as it was to want to talk about how crazy about Kurt he was and know there was literally no one except Kurt who could ever know that, for the most part when it came to day-to-day issues he could handle that. He had been hiding for long enough to be used to it, and it had only been in October that he'd gained even a single confidante; that he could talk to Kurt about things, at least, made the load a little lighter.

The problem was whenever things went beyond that boundary, went beyond the here-and-now. Today was fine. Tomorrow was fine. Even two weeks from now for the dance that Kurt was excited about for no reason Blaine could understand, he could deal with. It was once the future started to be painted in grand terms, sweeping brushstrokes without a definite timeframe that used phrases like 'When we're older' or 'at college' or 'someday.'

Or 'Once we're in New York.'

Practically every conversation with Kurt started with that phrase now. Once they got to New York, they could have friends who knew they were a couple. Once they were in New York, they could known other homosexuals, maybe even other homosexual couples, and then they could go on dates - real dates, like Finn and Quinn and Puck and Sandy went on. Once they were in New York, they would rise through the ranks of society and be invited to every elegant soiree in town, hosting their own galas with the most beautiful people in the most beautiful city in the world. Once they were in New York, they wouldn't find anyone prejudiced because people would know better, which meant that once they were in New York, they could practically dance down the street hand-in-hand and no one could tell them not to. 

Also the streets would be paved in gold, and there would be a chicken in every pot.

He didn't mean to find it all so ridiculous. He wanted to be able to buy into Kurt's fantasy, because it was obvious that, in Kurt's mind at least, they were blissfully, blithely happy once they got to New York. He had wanted to be able to buy into the fantasy all along, even if it had always seemed just a bit too fantastical for his tastes. He had almost gotten there, too...but then Baltimore happened, and then the drive-in, and it was like suddenly the entire thing went from being a bit overzealously unrealistic to being a bald-faced lie. Instead of abandoning it, Kurt had seized on it and began to plan ten times more. Blaine wasn't sure if that meant Kurt believed in it more than ever, or felt more desperate than before. At least the latter he could understand, even if he couldn't force himself to feel the same way.

He had certainly tried.

Maybe the future had always been the problem, he thought as he turned onto the street he had grown up on. Maybe on some level or another, that had always been their biggest sticking point. Maybe everything in the future just felt closer all of a sudden because everything at school had ramped up into the pre-graduation fervor. It happened every year, but this year was different because this year it actually impacted him. In previous years, with the exception of Council elections and his own finals, the end of the year held little significance for him aside from forcing him to go home for three months. Now, as graduation loomed, as everyone was excitedly chattering about their future plans...

...he just really didn't want to keep hearing about their life in a mystical fantasy land right now.

He could plan as far ahead as the dance, if he really had to, and Kurt was so excited about it that it was best to just let him have this. He wasn't looking forward to it, but he didn't hate the idea...and at the very least, he believed that there would be such a thing as a dance at Dalton in two weeks. That couldn't be said of any of Kurt's other future plans. 

Kurt's eyes widened as Blaine pulled into the driveway. "This is where you live?"

Not exactly, Blaine thought. He lived at Dalton. But as he understood what Kurt meant, and as he didn't want Kurt to see him as the surly teenager he could already feel himself starting to turn into just by being near his parents, he simply forced a smile and replied, "Yeah." It was a large house, though the outside did not look as grand as the interior; however, having to Kurt's house he could understand why he seemed so awed.

He would have rather gone to Kurt's, no matter how tiny it was. But that wasn't where the tuxedo was. The best he could hope for was getting in and out quickly before he had to deal with his father.

He led Kurt up the front walk and fished out his key, unlocking the front door and pushing it open. "Oh my," Kurt whispered as he took in the entryway, eyes wide and awed.

"It's not that big of a deal," Blaine shrugged.

"I've never been in a house with a grand foyer before. The closest I've come is Sandy Lopez's when she had a post-Sectionals party last year, and I think the Fabrays have one but not this big. It's amazing."

"It's really not."

"Are you kidding?" Kurt laughed, holding out his arms. "Look at it, Blaine, can you imagine the kind of festive evenings that a person could throw with a space like this? It's so elegant, so ritzy...It looks like Rosalind Russell should be coming down those stairs." When Blaine just stared at him, he explained, "Auntie Mame? Come on, Blaine, you must have seen it."

He had. His parents' house wasn't nearly that large, though he supposed it was closer to that kind of grandeur than Kurt's was.

"I didn't know you cared about all this stuff," he said cautiously. If he were merely ambivalent, he could have lived with Kurt's enthusiasm, however overabundant; but from the way Kurt looked as though he might begin to spin his way through the foyer and into the well-apportioned living room, let alone the formal dining room with its paintings and long table and elegant china cabinet that held dishes too formal for use even on holidays, Blaine was beginning to get the impression that this was what Kurt meant when he talked about throwing parties in New York. In Kurt's dreams, this was his life...wasn't it? In Kurt's most wild fantasies, he had run of an estate like this and had a house this grand as his own personal canvas for soirees and themed feasts and masquerade balls. 

To Kurt, this was something fantastic to dream about having one day. To Blaine, it was an ornately-furnished prison where everyone looked, dressed, drank, and spoke the same. Kurt probably wanted to dance up the stairs like Ginger Rogers, and Blaine wanted to run up them, grab his tux, and run back down to go back to Dalton where he felt like he could breathe, all before anyone saw him.

Was this what Kurt was going to be working toward if they moved there?

What if the worst thing the fantasy could be wasn't unrealistic or unobtainable? What if it wasn't something he even wanted to obtain?

Kurt turned to face him suddenly, looking confused and surprised. "If you mean do I think of you any differently, I don't," Kurt assured him sincerely. "I know most of the population of Dalton lives more like this than like me."

"What? Oh- no, Kurt, that's not-" Blaine tried to come up with the right way of explaining it to Kurt, but he wasn't entirely sure he could absent dragging Kurt along to insufferable parties for the next ten years until the novelty had long since worn off and the perpetual irritation and boredom set in. "It's just not as wonderful as-"

"Blaine?" His mother's high, pleasant voice carried from the next room as he heard the slow, even click of her heels against the polished hardwood. "Dear? What are you doing home? I wasn't expecting you."

"I'm sorry, it was a last-minute decision. We just need to pick up my tuxedo." When his mother's vacant gaze took on a slightly more curious quality, he added awkwardly, "The spring dance is coming up."

"We?" she glanced and noticed Kurt for the first time. "Oh - hello. I'm sorry, I don't believe we've met..."

"Mother, this is Kurt Hummel. He's-" There were a million words Blaine could use to describe Kurt. There were lofty adjectives dedicated to his strength and courage. There were words of high praise and envy dedicated to his whole-hearted self-acceptance that Blaine could never imagine being able to possess. There were physical descriptors attached to his porcelain skin and his incredible eyes and his completely kissable lips. There were ways of attempting to explain his unusual sense of humour and his penchant for sarcasm.

There was the terrifying relationship word that still felt foreign on his tongue and would be far worse than foreign inside this house.

"-a friend of mine from school." He noticed Kurt stiffen slightly, but he knew he would be introduced no differently to any of Kurt's family. The only time he might be introduced otherwise was to Rachel's father if ever they met. "Kurt - my mother, Genevieve Anderson."

Kurt shook his mother's hand with an exaggerated flourish and an even straighter posture than Blaine was used to from the boy who was already a generally more formal than the situation called for, albeit awkwardly and often with bad jokes in proportion to his nervousness. He seemed to be unable to tear his eyes away from the woman as he said, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Anderson. Blaine says such lovely things about you."

He didn't. He didn't talk about her at all, really, but it appeared Kurt had gotten the handbook on how to use pleasantries that meant nothing to be polite and blend in. While it was on the surface a good thing, if only because the last thing he wanted to deal with were concerns later about his rude friend, it was a side of Kurt he never wanted to see. 

He wasn't sure why it bothered him so much. He had certainly encouraged Kurt to blend in a little better, especially around people who weren't from Dalton. He wished so often that Kurt would be more discreet about things, wouldn't go around talking about the kinds of things he liked to talk about quite so loudly and quite so publicly. But the thought of Kurt turning into exactly whom he had dreaded becoming for as long as he could remember made him feel queasy. so much of what he admired about Kurt and his strength was tied up in his ability to be exactly who he wanted to be even when it wasn't who other people thought he should be. It was something Blaine could never hope to feel half as secure in as Kurt seemed to be...but somehow this was what Kurt wanted to be?  
"I won't keep you boys. Kurt, would you like to join us for dinner?"  
It was obvious from the way Kurt's posture changed just a bit that it was taking everything in him not to clap his hands together and bounce on his toes at the idea of a formal dining experience with multiple forks. He had seen dinner with Kurt's family and knew that casual warmth was their specialty-  
Maybe it was just an envy thing. A classic case of wanting whatever it is you've never had - the grass was greener on the other side of the manicured lawn, perhaps. It wasn't much consolation.  
"Thank you, Mrs. Anderson, I would love to," he grinned breathlessly, glancing over at Blaine with a quick upward flick of his eyebrows as if to say 'Can you believe it?' His mother smiled vacantly as she strode gracefully from the room with an even click of her heels.  
"Come on, let's go get the tux," Blaine said quietly, nodding toward the stairs. Luckily Kurt seemed to know enough to keep his gushing to a minimum until they were ensconced in his bedroom.  
"Oh my god, Blaine, why did you never tell me about your mother?" Kurt asked as he naturally took a place on the perfectly-made bed; it didn't bounce the same way as the mattress at Dalton.  
"What about her?" he asked as he turned to flick through his closet. The tux was behind a half dozen or so suits, and it was difficult to reach it without mussing the others.  
"She's perfect. So tall and graceful and elegant - your mother is Grace Kelly. She wears Dior - that was honest-to-god Dior! And those pearls...She's amazing. A mother like in the movies. Don't get me wrong, I love Carole and she makes my father incredibly happy. But when I was little, after my mother died, and I would go to Saturday matinees with Mercedes there were these women who were the epitome of style and grace, they never used the wrong fork or misplaced their glasses - they never had glasses. And they wore heels to do the vacuuming."  
"My mother has never used a vacuum in her life," Blaine pointed out.  
"Oh, that's even better," Kurt replied. "And then they would host these parties, these elegant dinner affairs with more than one course, and for vacations they would whisk off on an airplane to somewhere that would take days of driving to get to - or to Europe. Has she been to Europe?"  
"No." At least, not that he could recall. He unearthed the tuxedo and hung it on the doorknob as he went in search of the shirt.  
"Hm." Kurt seemed disappointed but calculating, as though if he could find another great thing that would restore the status Mrs. Anderson currently held as 'Too incredible to be real.' "California, then?"  
"My father has conferences out there every second year."  
That seemed to do the trick as Kurt shifted onto his stomach on the bed with a dreamy smile. "What's it like?"  
"I don't know, they don't take me," he replied.  
"No, I don't mean California - though if you had been, I would be incredibly jealous," he stated. "I meant having a mother like that."

Perhaps the strongest feeling that kept bubbling up around Kurt now was also the strangest, Blaine was finding. The disgust was gone, the envy at how easily Kurt could accept and express himself was still there but beneath the surface, and as much as the raw primal need to touch and kiss and touch Kurt would rise up suddenly and catch him off-guard in its urgency, it was far less frequent than it used to be. In place of those was a protectiveness that he couldn't entirely explain. It had gotten stronger since they had found out about the drive-in - seeing Kurt so utterly shaken like that, as though his entire worldview was up in the air and how worried that made him...

Blaine could relate to that. But just because he knew what it felt like didn't mean he wanted Kurt to have to go through that. If anything it made him want to protect Kurt more. He knew how much it hurt to think everything out there, everything you had put your hopes in, was a elaborate lie.

He still felt sick when he even thought the word Nationals. Or Baltimore.

The last thing he wanted was for Kurt, who was so good, so hopeful, to see the worst in the world. Just because he was cynical about the future and distrusting of everyone around him didn't mean he wanted Kurt to be, too. And he hated seeing Kurt upset.

But he didn't know if he could lie to Kurt and paint a rosy picture of his family life when it was so obviously not. Kurt would see that things weren't as grand as he imagined soon enough at dinner, he didn't need to break his dreams before then. Letting the realization wash slowly over Kurt in the awkward silence of the eight-foot long table would be more than enough. 

"I'm going to go change into this," he stated, holding up the hanger and nodding toward the bathroom across the hall.

"You don't have to go in there," Kurt replied, eyebrows lowered in confusion. "I've seen-"

Kurt didn't understand that it wasn't safe even in his bedroom here, he realized. It wasn't like school, it wasn't-

He pretended not to hear Kurt instead and walked across the hall with his clothes.

By the time he returned, Kurt was standing beside his desk, trailing an absent finger over the few knickknacks and photographs arranged across the surface. It had been part of Blaine's attempt to make the place feel more lived-in last summer; it hadn't worked. "Summer camp?" he asked, indicating a picture of a bunch of boys standing in front of a lake.

Blaine nodded. "Ages eight through fourteen." Back before his parents discovered boarding school and the summer was their only opportunity to get rid of him, he thought bitterly - it really was just being in this house that brought it out, he swore. "It's the one my father always wanted to go to as a child but couldn't afford."

"I can't imagine ever wanting to go to one. For one thing, I was definitely not the type to spend more time outdoors than absolutely necessary."

"It was fun, actually," he said, because it had been. It had been like a miniature version of Dalton in its own way, with its noise and orderly disorder, a bunch of boys who walked neatly to the mess hall in their pressed camp shirts but chattered all through breakfast before racing out the door to the lake to swim. "How's this?" he asked, indicating the tux.

Kurt turned to look at him, pursed his lips, and walked over to take a closer look. "Nice fit at the waist, perfect on the chest..." He paused a moment as he glanced Blaine up and down and blushed a little. 

"So you like it?" Blaine surmised with a faint, knowing smile. The way Kurt was almost staring, he must. 

"I will say this, Mr. Anderson," Kurt said with just a bit of a sway and a dreamy smile. "You know how to wear a tux."

Blaine smiled and rolled his eyes, but he couldn't help but relax a little. "So it's fine?"

"Well...I would take up the pants a little. But the sleeves..." Kurt ran his had slowly down Blaine's arm, smoothing the fabric downward. "Fit just fine."

"Yeah?" he asked, smiling a little more flirtatiously.

"Yeah," Kurt replied, then added with a smirk, "But don't get cocky. We need to talk about this shirt."

"What about the shirt?"

"The collar's all wrong for the tie," Kurt stated with a shake of his head as he reached up to try to adjust the bowtie.

"What are you doing?" Blaine laughed. "Ouch - okay, that's cutting off my airway-"

"It is not," Kurt replied. "Not if you can still complain about it." He tried to playfully swat Kurt's hands away, and Kurt pulled his head back in a comically overexaggerated manner. "Blaine Anderson, I swear, if you touch my hair-"

"You'll what?" Blaine grinned rather than pointing out that his hands were nowhere near Kurt's hair.

"I'll stop coming to your room-"

They were interrupted by the quiet sound of someone clearing their throat in the doorway. Blaine jumped back from Kurt as he spun to see- "Sir," he said breathlessly, his heart beating too fast to allow him to draw in a proper breath as he saw his father standing in the threshold. "I'm sorry, sir, I-"

"I wasn't expecting to see you, Blaine. You usually give us advance warning when you're coming," his father said evenly.

"I just needed to pick up a few things."

"Edgar could have brought them, it is part of his job."

As if a person needed a reason to go to the place that was supposed to be their home. As if he needed to warn them before he came back. Even though he knew what his father meant, the subtle (or not-so-subtle) insinuations drove him crazy. If Kurt showed up unannounced, it would be cause for celebration.

When he didn't have a ready response, his father simply left. And that, apparently, was that.

If only he could get his heart to recognize that and stop beating so quickly.

* * * * *

Dinner was, as usual, unbearably silent and tense. Kurt tried at first to engage the table in smalltalk using what Blaine was certain were topics he had seen in a list somewhere of polite dinner conversation because it sounded right out of his mother's playbook. While his mother would engage for just long enough to be polite, it was hardly what Kurt was expecting - that much was evident all over his face. 

As much as Blaine hated to think of it like that, maybe that meant it had been a good thing they stayed. Maybe this would get Kurt away from thinking that this was what we wanted. Maybe the "Once we're in New York" conversations could shift a little bit and feel less like he might suffocate if they ended up getting exactly what Kurt wanted. 

He never wanted Kurt to change per se, just to be slightly more...realistic about it all.

As they got ready to make the short drive back to Dalton, Blaine's father looked him directly in the eye and said, "A moment, please?"

Blaine contemplated trying to get out of it, but he knew there was no excuse he could give that would excuse him from his father's attempt at talking with him. The point at which his father actively sought him out, as he had learned over the years, there was very little he could do to escape. For one thing, years of training in the innerworkings of the brain made it difficult to be lied to effectively. He drew in a deep breath before answering, "Yes, sir. Of course." He glanced over at Kurt, and the look of nervousness on Kurt's face, as though he were terrified on Blaine's behalf, was both touching and unnerving. He much preferred dealing with his father as a solitary matter, and that was more than terrifying enough. The addition of another person just seemed to reinforce the fact that this was going to be excrutiating. "Kurt, if you'll excuse me-"

"Oh, of course. I'll stay here and discuss Chanel with your mother," he said, flashing a winning smile at Mrs. Anderson, who returned it with a more muted enthusiasm. 

Blaine tried to force a smile, but it was wobbly and they both knew it.

The walk down the hall to his father's study was short, but every step filled Blaine with more dread. His father knew, he had to. Why else would he be trying to pull him aside and corner him after a dinner where he had unknowingly met Blaine's boyfriend- there was no other explanation. Every other topic would be broached in the open, he certainly hadn't been shy about asking about why Blaine hadn't confirmed his attendance at Yale for the fall - a moment during which Blaine had been both surprised and relieved beyond measure that Kurt had understood enough to keep his mouth shut about damned New York - and that was the only thing Blaine could think of that his father would seek him out to talk to him about. 

Unless his father knew. 

And if his father knew...

He wondered if Kurt would be able to hear him screaming if his father already had orderlies in there to drag him off to a hospital when he refused to go. He wondered if he would even have the strength to tell them no.

It was hard to believe that the last time he'd been in this house, he had been trying desperately to tell his father so he could be helped. He wanted so badly to be cured, he knew he was wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt. Without question, he wanted to be fixed and his father held all the answers. His biggest fear had been that his father would be ashamed of him even while getting him help, that...that his father's reputation would suffer because his own son had fallen prey to such a fate. 

Now, though, only four months later...he knew he wasn't wrong. He and Kurt weren't sick, and what they had together was-...it certainly wasn't perfect, but it wasn't wrong.

Even though his father would believe otherwise and do everything in his power to-

His father closed the door to the study behind them. "Have a seat," he commanded more than urged, gesturing to the brown leather tufted chaise against one wall. Blaine sat stiffly at the foot end as his father took a seat in his wingback chair. He had never understood why his father's private study, where he never saw patients, looked so much like his office - maybe it was force of habit or something. Or the way his father felt most comfortable, in the sort of gentle interrogation...or was it aggressive psychological prodding? Blaine could never be sure. It walked a fine line that left the person on the receiving end perpetually wondering why they had revealed particular information, so maybe it was a little of both.

"I wanted to speak with you about this friend of yours," his father began, and Blaine stopped breathing. 

He knows. He knows, he knows heknowsheknowsheknows-

"What about him, sir?" he asked, projecting the most comfortable, confident air he could.

"He seems like a nice boy, obviously from a lower family but that's hardly his fault, now, is it? He must be hardworking if he's keeping up with the rigors of Dalton, obviously intelligent..." It seemed like his father was going down a checklist, a mental ledger of what qualities-...he remembered the same conversation when he was younger about a girl they wanted him to take out, a daughter of a family friend who was less-well-off than them but still worthy of consideration. If anything perhaps a bit more worthy, in his father's eyes - he had, after all, come up from relatively little.

Somehow Blaine doubted that was where the conversation was going.

He was careful not to let his agreement about Kurt's positive attributes show, even though his father was certainly right about Kurt's intelligence and work ethic. He was also strong and wouldn't be nearly this terrified were he in the same situation. 

How had his father known? 

He had been so careful during dinner, had tried so hard not to look too interested in what Kurt was saying, to not stare at him between courses even though Kurt was so stunningly beautiful that it was almost painful not to look at him. He had kept himself from laughing at Kurt's really bad jokes, and when he had seen that his failure to laugh had hurt the boy he had only barely refrained from apologizing. He hadn't reached for Kurt's hand or let it graze accidentally when passing the butter, he hadn't even sent smiles across the table in Kurt's direction. Was it-

Was it because of what his father had seen when he had passed the bedroom?

That had been stupid, but surely it wasn't to the level of-...they hadn't been doing anything, Kurt had been fighting with his tie but they weren't doing anything and it wasn't something that screamed 'homosexual!'...was it?

Was it?

He had no idea, he hadn't been paying close enough attention. Had he smiled too long at Kurt then? Touched his hand too much? He-...he wasn't even sure, he had let his guard drop and now-

"He's sick, son. He's...well, the sort I would treat."

It was the first time Blaine could remember his father calling him that. He was more busy trying not to cringe at the code. 

"He prefers the company of women, is fastidious in his manner, mincing, the way he speaks, his hips when he walks...I know this might be difficult to hear, Blaine, as I can tell you're obviously very fond of this boy," he said, his voice patronizing and smooth. "But that's precisely what worries me. Boys like your friend...they prey on that type of fondness. You find yourself wanting to spend time with him, to be around him, and the more he learns about you, the more he can use against you. I've seen a lot of cases like his over the years, and one thing that is nearly universal is the ability to twist anything to suit their own purposes. Someone as severely ill as he...you can't reason with them. It's not his fault," he added quickly. "He can't help the way his brain works any more than anyone else who is deeply disturbed...but that's what he is."

Blaine's fingers tightened, clenching into his palm so hard that he wondered if they might draw blood. If anyone was able to be logical about this, it was Kurt. It was Kurt who had pointed out that just because someone says something is wrong doesn't mean it actually is wrong. Kurt was the one who understood all of this, who had tried to help him-...

But what if he was wrong? What if Kurt really was just good at using any justification he could find to make himself believe what he wanted to? What if Kurt, however well-meaning, was still incorrect?

Six months ago, he would have believed that. Now, though...it felt right with Kurt, it felt real in a way that things never had with Jean, and it felt easy in a way that they probably never would with Rachel, and even though he would someday have to grow up this...this wasn't actually wrong. He knew that. He knew it and nothing his father could say would convince him otherwise.

"I don't want you falling in with the wrong sort, Blaine. You could be hurt. They're aggressive - the urges are too strong-"

He wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. 

"What-" Blaine cleared his throat to try to brig his voice down a bit. "What would you do for him?"

He wasn't sure why he even asked, maybe morbid curiosity, maybe trying to remind himself of exactly why he couldn't tell his father all the reasons he was wrong about Kurt...because he wanted to. He wanted to tell his father he didn't know anything, that Kurt was the least aggressive person he had ever encountered and that it was he who was the predator. That what they had wasn't dangerous, it was safe and warm and incredible and how dare he.

But he couldn't say that. Because if he did...

"In severe cases such as his, difficult ones like that..." His father sighed and shook his head; he looked tired and defeated, as though he was afraid to promise Blaine anything because Kurt's case was so grim, the outlook so bleak. "Treatment would need to be very aggressive, I'm afraid. Electro-shock therapy, combined with behavioural therapy to help with his inversion...and even then, it is unlikely he could ever function completely normally."

...He had to say something, but he couldn't. If he did, his father would know about him and then-

"You're wrong about him," was all he could say, and even that was more harsh than his father had been expecting. He looked at Blaine in shock, not used to being contradicted by anyone, least of all by his own son, and Blaine stared back at him. "You don't know anything about him, and you're wrong." Blaine pushed himself off the couch and strode from the room. He half expected his father to chase after, demand to know what he meant by that and since when he thought he had the right to talk back to his father because he had been raised better than that-

But his father didn't move from his place in the chair.

Blaine walked quickly down the hall into the foyer where Kurt was eagerly chattering about the difference between various designer perfumes that he had seen at the makeup counter at Macys. "We should be going now," he said, his voice sounding eerily calm to his ears even as he felt like he might begin to tremble so hard he would be unable to remain standing. 

Kurt regarded him suspiciously and with evident concern. "Is everything okay?"

Blaine gave a wobbly nod; his mother either didn't notice or didn't comment. He wasn't sure which one, and he hoped to god he never knew. "Everything's fine." 

It was obvious from Kurt's expression that he knew it was a bald-faced lie, but he simply turned to Blaine's mother and said with a bright smile, "Mrs. Anderson, thank you for a lovely evening." He shook her hand, clasping his left around the back of it, then allowed Blaine to lead him out.

He felt like he couldn't breathe. He had thought his father was wrong on so many things for so long, but on this of all things - to tell him that he was incorrect-

What on earth had made him say that?

As he glanced over at Kurt in the passenger seat, still grinning over the evening and talking about how the concept of "dressing for dinner" was a dying art, and one he needed to reintroduce at Dalton if only because his own family would never go for such a thing because really, he wasn't sure if his father even owned more than two ties...he could imagine that melting away, the enthusiasm being cut out suddenly until he was only an empty shell of Kurt in fantastic clothes with the same rote questions, but suddenly not caring if anyone actually answered them. 

"Once we're in New York, we'll dress for dinner. I know you have enough suits for it now - I've seen your closet," Kurt stated as though one's closet was the most intimate and revealing thing a person could see of another.

There was only one thing he wanted less than to become his father, and that was for Kurt to become his mother. 

Whatever else happened, at least he had accomplished that much.


	34. Chapter 34

here were three letters on his desk, and by the end of the night there would be only two.  
  
Deadlines were coming up, Blaine knew that, and while he wasn't generally the type to procrastinate like this...it had kind of become unavoidable this time. After trying for months to figure out what precisely it was he was searching for, what it was he wanted for himself, it came down to the same choice he'd had from the very beginning:  
  
Yale, Columbia, or Stanford.  
  
If it had just been about the schools, it would have been difficult enough. Yale was more prestigious, of course, and had numerous vocal groups Blaine would have jumped at the chance to be part of. Their a cappella choir culture made Dalton look positively backwater, with groups like the Duke's Men and the Whiffenpoofs recruiting singers like fraternities. Getting into the right group secured a new student status and friends instantly, and they were even more respected at Yale than the Warblers were at Dalton. That sounded perfect.  
  
But of course it wasn't.  
  
The photographs he had seen of Columbia's campus looked intriguing, like cramming the entire collegiate experience into six blocks in Manhattan like a tiny oasis...but it was near the center of everything. New York was the center of the universe, wasn't it? The culture, the food, the  _music_  - nothing that would exist in New Haven, he knew that much. With so many different types of people that he could slip under the radar and not stand out against the stark white old money types at Yale.   
  
Stanford hadn't originally been a choice he could justify if the decision were made on school alone; he had applied only as an escape clause, a way to go as far from his parents as humanly possible so he wouldn't be obligated to return home for weekends and holidays. They were co-ed, there, too, which held a sense of mystery after four years at an all-boys' school. But there was something that felt exciting about Stanford itself, the way it had grown in the past 15 years or so - their sciences were getting all sorts of national attention. That wasn't something he thought he was interested in, but it was still impressive.   
  
On educational and extracurricular opportunities alone, the decision would have been difficult but probably been Yale. While he wasn't sure precisely what he wanted to study, he knew it probably wasn't any type of science, and the appeal of Columbia had only ever been its location even though it was certainly a good school. It just wasn't the type of exceptional school that a Dalton boy was entitled to.  
  
But it wasn't about academics. Not once it came down to these three. It was about so much more than that, so many more problems.  
  
The question, Blaine concluded as he stared at the three acceptance letters and their accompanying letters of intent, was what he wanted in the broader sense. What life each school would bring him.  
  
Yale was about becoming his father, which was the last thing he wanted. No choir in the world could make up for the stifling atmosphere, for the intense conformity - could he even  _be_  the kind of singer he wanted to be there? Would they let him just let loose like the Warblers did, let him pour his emotions out onstage until he had nothing left inside him? Or would they stand, stiff and stone-faced, while quietly harmonizing their way through lifeless standards and expect him to do the same? What would he become if he went there?  
  
...Wouldn't he become that anyway? In all honesty?  
  
Because as enticing as Columbia seemed, as much as he had been pumped full of bright and cheery facts about New York thanks to Kurt's neverending litany of reasons the city would be their safe haven, he still didn't know that he believed any of it. Had he ever, really? he wondered. Had he ever actually thought it might be the way Kurt said? Or had he just let himself like watching Kurt like the idea?   
  
One day, not too far from now, he was going to have to grow up and start living in the real world. Away from the safe enclave of a liberal school, he was going to need to take his proper place in society as-...as some cog in a business, as a society man with a wife and well-groomed children who attended schools that let them stand out only to see them smashed back down as soon as they grew up, so the cycle could repeat itself again-  
  
He wasn't sure which was worse: going through that, or knowing that he would have to watch everyone else go through it too.   
  
Knowing Kurt would have to learn to go through it at some point, too. Because he could talk about New York all he wanted, but it was never going to be like Kurt thought and he had to learn that. He would either learn it now or once he was already there and struggling and miserable, but either way-  
  
...either way, it didn't seem too likely.  
  
And even if it was...did he and Kurt even want the same things? Did they even have the same vision of the future, even assuming he could let himself kind of believe in the utopia in art deco? Because if what Kurt wanted for them was the same thing his parents wanted for him only with himself in place of a girl...  
  
Would he even be happy then? Would it honestly feel any better than the life he had been trying to find his way out of from the time he could remember? The life he was still fighting tooth and nail to reject even though its pull was so strong and there weren't any other options out there?   
  
Maybe, he allowed himself to think. Maybe it would feel better with Kurt. Maybe it could be okay in New York even if what Kurt wanted was a lifetime of what he thought was deadness inside. After all, he didn't feel the same way with girls that he did with Kurt, not even Jean or Rachel or girls he actually halfway liked. He felt so much better with Kurt, even just sitting in the same room. He just had to  _look_  at the boy and he felt amazing and like he couldn't stop smiling - that wasn't like what his parents had, not in the least. He couldn't remember them ever taking enjoyment in one another the way he did with Kurt, and maybe-...maybe it was because his parents were just two people who were incapable of that. Or maybe his mother had been capable of it and his father successfully stifled it because he couldn't understand it, the same way he shut down and "cured" everything else he didn't understand.  
  
But what if he was wrong? What if after everything, nothing was different? What if  _he_  was no different-  
  
He didn't know what he wanted, but he did know what he didn't want.  
  
Drawing in a deep breath, Blaine pulled the letter toward him, signed the notice of intent, and placed it in its envelope. He would send it out to be mailed first thing in the morning.  
  
It was done.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt wondered what it meant that he had gone all year and not even known that Dalton had a social hall. He always just thought the Commons sufficed for all things social, but apparently there it was - down past the library, near the faculty parking lot, not far from a great view of the water. As they approached, the sight of teenagers milling around outside was as sure an indicator of the evening's festivities as the faint strains of music pouring out into the spring night: Boys in nearly-identical tuxedos, girls in full-skirted dresses, a veritable vision of floral-coloured tulle and chiffon.  
  
To his credit, Rachel didn't look half bad. He had talked her out of a hideous canary yellow dress with a lace overlay that anything but delicate and refined and had instead found her a lovely [light pink](http://www.bluevelvetvintage.com/images/P/dr2056v1.jpg) one that managed to steer clear of her usual pitfalls. For one thing, she looked age-appropriate and - if he did say so himself, as someone who would never be physically attracted to her - quite beautiful.. And she hadn't even resisted him too much; maybe she was learning that if she just let him have his way when it came to her wardrobe, she would love the end result. Even Rachel could be trained, it seemed.  
  
Mercedes, of course, had fought him over dress selection for days. In the end, he had spent all weekend on his bed sewing sequins onto her [mermaid gown in shocking pink](http://www.bluevelvetvintage.com/images/T/t_1312.jpg), because Mercedes claimed that the dress was already enough of a compromise without giving up her chance to sparkle.  
  
She was even more excited than he was about being able to go, though he had gathered from their shopping conversations that she would rather being going with someone who wanted to go with her. Kurt could relate - he would much rather be going with Blaine, but even he wasn't crazy enough to suggest that.  
  
It didn't stop a boy from wishing. From longing to be escorted in on Blaine's arm, casting looks across the hall at all the onlookers with a knowing smile because he and Blaine both knew they were the happiest, most in love, best-dressed couple in that room. From aching to dance with the boy in whose arms he wanted to stay all the time...even when they were fighting, which was more frequent now. It didn't matter. Once they got to New York, everything would be fine - it was all just the stress of everything starting to wear on them. It was hard to remain happy and optimistic about everything when it felt like the world was out to get them, which was why Kurt made it his job to ensure that he kept them focused on the future. On the day they would be safe and happy and able to be freely themselves in more places than just Blaine's bedroom.  
  
For now, he would settle for their wearing matching flowers - light pink carnations that almost blended into Rachel's dress but complimented Mercedes' well enough. It hadn't been part of his plan for both of their dates to wear pink, but he had certainly been glad as he pinned on his boutonniere and watched Blaine do the same.   
  
It was like the Warbler pins: no one else needed to know or notice, because they knew what it meant and that was enough.  
  
Blaine looked amazing in his tuxedo, even more now than he had at his house. Something about the light, probably, and the heightened feeling of the evening. He looked sophisticated, ever the picture of a dapper leading man. Kurt had desperately wanted to get him into a white dinner jacket - like a younger and far more attractive Humphrey Bogart, he had pointed out - but Blaine insisted that would get far too much attention. Kurt thought he would look outstanding.  
  
Though no one was going to steal focus from him, he knew.   
  
Kurt stood proudly in his [silver brocade dinner jacket](http://ny-image1.etsy.com/il_570xN.88151597.jpg), smiling as he saw the way the other boys looked at him. They were all wearing practically the same tuxedo - they finally had a chance to be out of that damned uniform, and they were still dressed alike. Where was the fun in that? What was the point of going out if you didn't get to actually wear anything remotely interesting? He knew from spending a year with these boys that they did, in fact, have personalities under those blazers, but one would never know it from this particular display.   
  
Blaine had tried to talk him out of the jacket once he saw it. Said Kurt would stand out too much and that if the entire point of bringing the girls was to blend, then he probably shouldn't walk around in something that glittered that much. But there was no way he wasn't going to wear this, not after it had taken him so long to find silver braid he could hand-stitch to the side seams in place of the more traditional black grosgrain ribbon. Besides, he looked fantastic and felt even better.   
  
"Where's Sam tonight?" Blaine asked as they scanned the hall. Most of the Warblers were easily found, and not just because about half of them had gathered in one corner together with a group of bored-looking girls as usual. Really, it was almost a shame he was leaving, Kurt thought, he would never have a chance to start his consulting business.   
  
"He's not coming," Kurt replied.   
  
"What? Why not?"  
  
"He's working on some kind of project. When he told me he didn't have a date, I offered to find one for him - I certainly know my share of girls, and as the boys at this school go he's not half bad, if a little oblivious. His response was, and I quote, 'No thanks, I'm not that pathetic. No, seriously, I'm not that big of a nerd, am I? Now if you'll excuse me, these rockets aren't going to build themselves,'" Kurt relayed in a dry deadpan.  
  
Blaine laughed. "It would be better if you had a Sam impression."  
  
"Does Sam have a Sam impression?" Kurt wondered aloud. "And if he does, does it sound anything like him?"  
  
"I have no idea. Probably. You should hear him do you, though," Blaine grinned.  
  
Kurt's smile faded and his eyes grew wider. "Wait - he does an impression of me? What does he say? Is it-"  
  
"No way," Mercedes butted in, holding up her hand. "I know you two are new at this, but Rachel and I? We're girls."  
  
Blaine looked at her, brow lowered in confusion with a look on his face of pure bewilderment. "I...can tell that?"  
  
"We have needs. Those girls over there?" Mercedes gestured to the Warblers' dates who were still standing around looking bored. "No way. Not for us."  
  
"Mercedes is right," Rachel piped up. "If we're going to do this-" she said with an exaggerated wink that made Blaine look around nervously and made Kurt simply roll his eyes. He was oddly used to it by now. "-then you need to act the part. Which starts with dancing. Now come on - I love [this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-CzCDIiylE)," she told Kurt as she took his hand and forcibly led him out onto the floor. Kurt sent Blaine a look pleading for help, and Blaine held his hands out palms up as if to ask 'what can I do? When a lady demands a dance...'  
  
Dancing with Rachel wasn't so bad, Kurt concluded. He felt horribly awkward, but they had similar styles and faults - both were far more used to choreography and big production numbers than this type of dancing, so they really danced more like the upper-body half of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers number...which looked more spastic when the feet weren't going fast enough to distract the viewer from the strange, occasionally-jerking upper-body movements. But he found himself grinning and laughing even as they looked ridiculous, half-falling into each other.   
  
He glanced over and caught sight of Blaine dancing with Mercedes. He looked as skillful as Kurt had imagined, as though despite being used to dancing by himself while the rest of the Warblers step-touched behind him, he had a decent awareness of how his body moved and how to look cool while doing it. Or maybe he just had enough charisma to pull it off regardless, Kurt theorized. Blaine did have that effect on people a lot of the time.   
  
As Blaine danced with Mercedes, spinning her and joking with her about something Kurt couldn't hear, he found himself getting jealous. He knew there was nothing there, he'd practically had to beg Blaine to go with her despite a lack of other acceptable options, they were just being nice to one another and Blaine had the ability to be almost instantly likable. He understood all of that and was under no misillusions that Mercedes was somehow going to move in on his boyfriend. That would be ridiculous.  
  
But he wished he were dancing in her place.  
  
He wanted Blaine to be able to spin him across the floor. He wanted to be able to wrap his arm around Blaine's shoulder and clasp his hand and dance there together...  
  
He had wanted it for so long. Since Sectionals at the latest, and probably before then really.   
  
After a few songs, the band changed to a [slower number](http://youtu.be/ngZh6ZSRoYg). As couples flocked to the dance floor, Rachel squeezed his hand. "We should go fix our hair," she stated. When Kurt reached up self-consciously, confused because he shouldn't have been doing enough dancing to throw it out of place, she smiled and shook her head. "Mercedes and I," she clarified, waving Mercedes over.   
  
"Why-"  
  
"Oh, don't worry - I'll be insisting on a slow dance later," she stated. "But we really are better on fast numbers." She leaned in and kissed his cheek, then she and Mercedes left the hall in search of a powder room. Kurt wondered if there even was a place for girls at this school - probably why they had an entirely separate hall for events where there might be girls present, he thought with a faint smirk.   
  
He drifted toward the punch table, which was presently populated by boys who for some reason or another didn't have dates...and Blaine. He ladled two cups of the bright red drink and walked to stand beside his boyfriend.  
  
Blaine couldn't stop staring at the dance floor. They looked so happy out there, all of them - even the girls who kept tiring of the boys who had invited them because they didn't know how to pay them proper attention looked like they were enjoying themselves. A genuine sort of happiness, too, not the forced smile he kept plastering on so no one would discover his secrets. Either that, or Nick and Jeff and Wes and David were much better actors than he would have expected. And why shouldn't they be happy? They were the type who could naturally be contented with whatever it was that was expected of them. Wes practically relished in it, with his obsession with rules and order. Why shouldn't they be happy dancing with girls at their formal? Why shouldn't they look like they were anxious to get out to their cars at the end of the night so they could pretend to drive their date home and go parking instead?   
  
They didn't feel torn between who they were supposed to be, who they wanted to be, and who they actually were like this. They hadn't just needed to make a grueling choice between three possible futures, each of which would require closing the door on two other potential futures that might work out better. They didn't need to worry about any of this because they felt like they should be who they were, that they would become who they were meant to be, and that was all the more they needed to think about any of it.  
  
A year ago, he could almost do the same. A year ago he had come alone, yes, but he hadn't felt nearly this wrecked watching the happy couples dancing. Wistful, sure, but all the boys on the sidelines during slow dances felt wistful as they were reminded of their loneliness. That was a perfectly normal response. Everyone knew they would eventually grow up and find a girl to take dancing, it was just a matter of when.  
  
This year, though...  
  
Kurt nudged his shoulder casually and held out a cup of punch. "Here," he said quietly with faint smile. Blaine took it, holding the etched tumbler in his hand as he kept looking out over the crowd. "That tastes...pink," Kurt stated. He was trying too hard to be cheerful, and they both knew it, trying to make everything feel like this was perfectly fine but it wasn't. It was awkward and lonely and infuriating because Blaine wished he could just...  
  
...something.  
  
He didn't even know what anymore.   
  
Still he forced a smile, glancing down at the brightly-coloured elixir before gazing out at the dance floor again.  
  
"Everyone looks really happy," Blaine offered.  
  
"Assuming it's not a lie," Kurt replied, and when Blaine looked over at him sharply he explained, "You look that way around them, too. But I know better." When Blaine tried to shrug off the concern, Kurt continued, "I know you're not happy, and I understand - believe me, I wish we could-"  
  
The girls reappeared through the crowd, and Blaine didn't think he'd ever been so happy to see someone in his life. "Hey, guys," he grinned as they got closer. The slow dance was winding down and the couples began to pull apart as the band started the [next song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-XQ26KePUQ). "Mercedes - may I have this dance?" he asked. He could feel Kurt shift uncomfortably beside him, but he ignored it and held out his hand to her.   
  
Mercedes' eyes narrowed as she looked from him to Kurt and back again before taking his hand and replying, "Sure. You've got good moves for a white boy." He didn't bother to correct her, leading her out on the floor instead.  
  
"What are you doing?" Kurt hissed after him, and Blaine turned to face him.  
  
"Dancing with my date," he replied simply with a shrug.  
  
 _You can dance  
Every dance with the guy  
Who gives you the eye  
Let him hold you tight._  
  
Blaine wished it were half as simple as the shrug made it seem like. It wasn't. It was frustrating - almost as frustrating as the fact that Kurt couldn't see why it wasn't easy. Almost as frustrating as Kurt's complete inability to see the reality of their situation.   
  
Kurt had no idea about his unhappiness. He had no comprehension of the fourteen directions it felt like he was being pulled in and all the things he wanted to be but couldn't. Homosexuality was just the tip of a very large iceberg these days and Kurt thought it was the be-all and end-all. He thought it was as simple as just saying "There's always next year" and going from there, he didn't understand that there were other issues at play. He didn't understand that there were things he had to give up, that there were-...Kurt didn't understand that everything had a cost. He didn't appreciate that not everyone could believe in things just because he stated them as fact.   
  
What scared him more was the idea that Kurt never would. He had tried explaining it so may times, had tried to show him why it wasn't nearly as black-and-white as he tried to make it. It wasn't as simple as shouting "I am who I am and there is nothing wrong with me" from the rooftops and having that suffice.  
  
 _You can smile  
Every smile for the man  
Who held your hand  
'Neath the pale moonlight._  
  
"Come on, then," Rachel said, grabbing Kurt's hand.  
  
"What are you doing?"  
  
"Well, you're not just going to let your friend-" A knowing smile this time instead of a wink; maybe her eye was getting tired or developing a permanent twitch. He was almost afraid to ask. "-go dance out there without you, are you?"  
  
"Rachel, he's not going to-"  
  
"The surest way to get a man's attention," she stated with a voice that conveyed the utmost authority "is to make him jealous."  
  
"Rachel, you tried that last year. Finn still didn't break up with Quinn."  
  
"Yes, but they're not actually dating," she pointed out. "Even though they do make a nice couple when they dance because she's just a little shorter than he is with the heels. You and I would have been better last year, before you grew."  
  
He gave her a deadpan look and bit back every sarcastic comment he could think of, then led her by the hand out onto the dance floor - strategically in view of Blaine and Mercedes. After all, if he had felt jealous seeing the two of them dancing earlier (and was a little more jealous now), maybe it would be true in reverse. With a pointed look, he pulled Rachel into position-  
  
"Wrong way" she pointed out, sliding his hand from her shoulder down to her waist. He knew that, he had been dancing for years, he just wasn't used to envisioning himself in a leading role.  
  
 _But don't forget who's taking you home  
And in whose arms you're gonna be  
So darlin', save the last dance for me._  
  
Blaine found himself irrationally angry at Kurt's self-satisfied, almost smug look as he took the dance floor with Rachel. The boy looked as though he were trying to prove a point, and not only did he not know what that point  _was_ , but he didn't care. It felt like the worse things got, the more determined Kurt was to be right.  
  
Kurt had no idea what it was like to be him. Kurt had figured out who he was relatively easily just by reading it i a book, he hadn't spent his entire life being told he was wrong - not just wrong,  _sick_. Horribly, disgustingly twisted and a threat to every good and moral person in society. Kurt could act as though this was all about him, their not being able to dance, but he didn't have the first clue what it was like for  _him_.  
  
Kurt didn't flinch every time someone called his name these days, he didn't sit there and wait for his father to show up with a brigade of trained medical professionals to cart him away to have electrodes placed on him or needles shoved into his brain to try to cure him of this thing that Kurt thought was no big deal. He didn't wait for his entire future to come crashing down around him as he was relegated to a home for the chronically, criminally, incurably insane.  
  
No amount of "I'm not wrong" was going to protect Kurt from that fate. Blaine was the only thing that could, and now...  
  
He didn't know if his father had figured it out yet or not, but he knew it had to be only a matter of time.   
  
What he had said had been incredibly stupid and impulsive, and the boy he had done it to protect had absolutely no idea the danger he had been in in the first place.  
  
 _Oh I know (Oh I know)  
That the music's fine  
Like sparkling wine  
Go and have your fun.  
Laugh and sing,  
But while we're apart  
Don't give your heart  
To anyone.  
But don't forget who's taking you home  
And in whose arms you're gonna be  
So darlin', save the last dance for me._  
  
What started as smugness dissipated almost as soon as they were on the dance floor. Kurt didn't want to win the argument, he didn't want to make Blaine jealous of Rachel (or, worse yet, jealous of  _him_  for dancing with Rachel, who was kind of an aggressive lead for a girl in a really frustrating way, and he wondered if Blaine knew that).   
  
What he wanted was to just dance with the boy he loved. He wanted to dance with Blaine, to feel his broad hand cradling the small of his back and Blaine's bicep under his hand while their fingers intertwined. He wanted to look just slightly down at his dance partner instead of all the way down to Rachel - why hadn't he put her in taller heels again? He wanted to feel Blaine whisk him effortlessly across the floor instead of Rachel dragging him from point A to point B like this was a choreographed number and he was behind the count.  
  
He wanted to be able to be like everyone else, dancing with the person they were dating. He wanted what everyone else had, only with Blaine.  
  
 _Baby don't you know I love you so?  
Can't you feel it when we touch?  
I will never, never let you go  
I love you oh so much._  
  
Kurt gazed over at Blaine longingly, hoping to catch his eye.and share a moment - however small, however many people between them. He wanted to be able to feel for just a second like they were connected even though they couldn't have any of this.  
  
When Blaine's line of sight finally fell on him, he saw only anger. Frustration.  _Contempt_  of all things.  
  
Blaine was mad at him?  _Blaine_  was frustrated with  _him_?  _Blaine_  was the one parading his rent-a-date (he would apologize to Mercedes later for thinking of her in those terms later) around the floor to proclaim just how normal he was.  _Blaine_  was the one practically ignoring him when they weren't dancing. And yet  _Blaine_  was the one who was frustrated?  
  
Hell no.  
  
Two could play that game.  
  
His own gaze settling into a glare, he spun Rachel sharply away from Blaine and kept dancing.  
  
 _You can dance  
Go and carry on  
Til the night is gone  
and it's time to go  
If he asks  
If you're all alone  
Can he take you home  
you must tell him no.  
Cause don't forget who's taking you home  
And in whose arms you're gonna be  
So darlin', save the last dance for me_  
  
Now Kurt looked indignant that he was frustrated? Blaine wasn't going to -...no. Kurt, who was nowhere near realistic about anything, who had no concept of what happened to people like them out in the world, did not get to look angry at him like that. Gripping Mercedes tightly, he spun her quickly, rotating his way in a circle around Kurt and Rachel. Couples in their path cleared, if only for fear that momentum would work in Blaine's favour. He kept his eyes on Kurt's, coming back to them as his spot on every turn.   
  
This was reality. This was what people like them did. Not whatever fantasy Kurt had about getting to dance together in front of everyone - he probably thought they could kiss in public, too, he was that delusional. It would be nice, sure, but it was never going to be like that and the longer he protected Kurt from the ice cold facts-  
  
Kurt didn't know the depth of his father's treatment methods because Blaine let him stay ignorant. He didn't know the horror stories because Blaine didn't want to tell him. He didn't want to destroy Kurt's innocence and sweetness and hope, but was he actually protecting him at all? Because if Kurt kept on like this, he would offend the wrong person soon and...and then who knew what would happen?  
  
This was reality. Dancing in public with a girl, that was reality. That was what they had. Dancing together was only in Kurt's mind.  
  
Kurt stared at Blaine, at the harshness in his eyes - the  _cruelty_  there- What had he done to deserve that? Was what he wanted really so horrible that he should get that glare for even  _wanting_  it? Swallowing hard, he pulled out of Rachel's grasp and darted out of the gym as quickly as he could.   
  
He had no idea if anyone noticed, but he could guarantee Blaine knew and would hold him personally responsible.  
  
What had happened to them? he wondered desperately as he hurried down the mostly-empty hallway. How had they gone from best friends in public and much, much more behind closed doors to feeling like Blaine constantly angry with him or blaming him for something? Had he misread something? Was it something he had done? Had someone said something that was shoving him back to the Blaine he had been in January?  
  
He didn't expect Blaine to follow him, especially not after that display, and he stiffened when he heard the familiar voice call "Kurt, wait."   
  
Kurt turned sharply on his well-polished heel. "What do you want?" he asked, voice tight with frustration.  
  
"What is wrong with you?" Blaine asked. "You-" He glanced furtively at the girls near the other end of the hall and half-dragged Kurt into an alcove further from the restrooms. "You're the one who told me to bring her, you aren't allowed to get mad at me when I dance with her."  
  
"As though you would have danced with me if I had asked? As though you would have  _brought me_  if I had said-"  
  
"Are you kidding?" Blaine demanded, staring at him. "I-...Kurt, you know we-"  
  
"We can't," Kurt replied icily, parroting what Blaine had been saying for months now. "I'm well aware."  
  
"Then what do you want from me?" Blaine wanted to ask everyone that these days. What did they want from him? What did they honestly expect he could do to please every person at all times? What was he supposed to do? Just pick the parts he cared about and dump the rest? Just-...wasn't that what he had done when he picked a college? Wasn't picking the part that was most important to him supposed to make him feel better instead of worse? Wasn't he supposed to be able to just move on now that the choice was made?  
  
But the look on Kurt's face was heartbreaking. "You know," he whispered with a quick glance back toward the gym...and Blaine did know.   
  
A dance. That was what Kurt wanted from him. A dance, one damned-  
  
"You don't think I wish we could?" he whispered back. "That we could be  _normal_  like that? You don't think I wish you were a girl sometimes so we could just-" He saw the stricken look on Kurt's face at that, and he shook his head. "I didn't mean it like-...We could be okay then."  
  
"Blaine..." Kurt reached out and took his hand, and the fact that Blaine almost yanked it back sent up every red flag in the book. Blaine had never been shy about touching his hand in public. Never. He had taken his hand the first day they  _met_  for crying out loud, before Blaine even knew him or if he were trustworthy. People around or not, that had never been who they were and the fact that now Blaine was practically trying to hide from him, to shut him out- "Listen to me. We are okay. We  _are_. There's nothing wrong with who we are, it's just their ignorance. And once we're in New York-"  
  
Would he ever stop being so naive? Blaine wondered, and before he could stop it the words were tumbling out of his mouth. "It's not going to be like you say it is. Not  _that_  - there will never, ever be a time or a place where two boys can dance together to some Drifters song and have it be okay. Dancing-...that kind of dancing is strictly between a man and a woman, whether they love each other or not - it's not a romantic thing, it's- it's  _technical_ , and the only way you can adapt it to two men is if one of them isn't a man anymore. You can't just swap out two men for something and pretend it works just as well."  
  
Kurt's gaze hardened into an angry glare the more Blaine spoke. "Yes, Blaine," he said in a quiet, sarcastic tone, "because that's been really persuasive when talking about anything else that applies to us. I'll be sure to remember that the next time we sing a song traditionally sung by a man and a woman - or the next time your hand is down my pants."   
  
Being Blaine's dirty little secret was bad enough - feeling like Blaine was perpetually hiding him even if he never wanted to hide Blaine, but he could understand why Blaine thought that was necessary...but being his dirty little secret who was really just a substitute was almost more than he could handle right now. He turned and stormed down the hall toward the exit, not breaking into a run until he was met with the evening breeze and the smell of freshcut grass.  
  
He couldn't go back in there. He had become a master at pretending he was fine when he wasn't, if only because he had spent so many years trying not to let his father worry about him, but some things even he couldn't fake. If he went back in there right now, every single person in the school would know that he and Blaine had had a fight, and they would want to know why. And while most of the boys would have no idea, some of the more clever ones might suspect.  
  
He was almost tempted to go back for that reason. It would serve Blaine right, wouldn't it? All this time and treating him like he was some foolish schoolboy with an unrepentant crush, like their love for one another was something that could be turned on and off like a lightswitch - it would serve Blaine right.  
  
...Only not really. Because if the entire point was that they both knew that they couldn't dance together, then his going back in there and making clear everyone knew his heart was breaking wasn't going to do anyone any good, now, was it?  
  
He would have to go back eventually, if only because neither Rachel nor Mercedes knew where to find his dorm and they would be stopped by a faculty member before they got there anyway. But for right now, he needed a moment.  
  
He unlocked his door and strode in, flopping back on the bed and closing his eyes. It wasn't until he heard a low "What happened to you?" that he even remembered Sam would be there. He jumped, letting out a startled squeak, and Sam laughed awkwardly. "Sorry, I didn't mean to-"  
  
"No," Kurt replied breathlessly as he tried to calm his racing heart. "I forgot you were here. How's your, um. ...Rockets?" He sat up and carefully fixed his hair, shifting to sit on the edge of the bed with his legs delicately crossed.  
  
"Good," Sam replied. "Still in the beginning stages, but by this summer..." His face lit up in a way Kurt hadn't really seen it except when he talked about comic books or those strange science fiction films. "I always loved this stuff, but I can finally do enough of the equations and the more complex math stuff. And it's the first summer I haven't had summer school to try and fix whatever I got wrong during the year."  
  
"Congratulations," Kurt replied quietly. He was happy for Sam, he really was, but seeming happy when he was as miserable as he was required more energy than he had right now.  
  
"What's wrong?"  
  
"Nothing," Kurt tried, smoothing the bedspread to buy himself a moment before he attempted to force a smile.   
  
"You and Blaine have a fight or something?"  
  
Kurt froze. Sam couldn't know-...could he? He probably didn't mean that, he probably just meant did Kurt have a fight with his  _best friend, Blaine_ , because when people fought with their best friends they got upset, too. "Something like that."  
  
"Give him flowers or something, that's what the other guys do. Does it work like that when you're both guys? Anyway, he'll get over it."  
  
Kurt's heart felt like it was beating out of his chest. No. Sam couldn't know- for one thing, Sam was oblivious, and for another Blaine would be  _furious_  with him if he found out that Sam knew even though he had never said so much as a  _word_  to the fake-blond about it. He had been incredibly careful and never said anything that could make Sam suspect- "H-how-" he managed to choke out.  
  
Sam gave him a deadpan look. "When did you start thinking I was stupid, too?"  
  
"What? No- I-I don't, but you-"  
  
"Kinda obvious you like him."  
  
Was it? Maybe, Kurt guessed, he did kind of have a hard time not smiling whenever Blaine was around...or being talked about...or just on his mind, to be entirely honest, but if Sam had noticed then how many other people had? "How long have you known?"  
  
Sam thought a second. "October or something? I dunno. It's been awhile."  
  
"Who else...?"  
  
Sam shrugged. "I don't think anyone else knows. No one's said anything about it, anyway."  
  
He sounded so matter-of-fact about it. So nonchalant. The polar opposite of the picture of fire and brimstone Blaine painted whenever the idea of people finding out was tentatively raised. "Why don't you care?" Kurt asked suddenly, then his eyes widened. "Are  _you_ -"  
  
Sam coughed and it sounded for a moment like he was choking. "No. I'm not. I just...I dunno, I saw how you looked at him and you didn't look at me like that, so what did it matter?" Kurt couldn't even process that- Sam had known all this time and didn't think he was going to do any of the things that the books said he would do? For that matter, Sam who couldn't figure out anything when it came to girls or relationships somehow could tell what that adoring look was? What exactly-  
  
"Besides," Sam added more quietly, "You were the only person who didn't think I was a complete freak. I wasn't gonna be a jerk to you."  
  
Kurt didn't even know how to begin responding to that, and he wasn't given the chance to try; there was a knock at the door, followed by a hurried, "Kurt, please. We need to talk."  
  
That Blaine hadn't even checked to make sure Sam wasn't in the room spoke volumes about how desperate Blaine was to talk to him. Even if he wanted nothing to do with his boyfriend right now, he supposed he should give him the courtesy of listening. He glanced over at Sam who simply nodded. "I'll be downstairs," he said as he grabbed his notebook.  
  
Blaine knocked again impatiently, and Kurt called out a quiet, "One second." He drew in a deep breath, trying to steel himself for the fight he didn't want to keep having.  
  
"It'll be fine," Sam assured him in what Kurt was sure had to be the oddest moment he had ever experienced. How would the heterosexual boy who had never had a girlfriend know that it would be okay with his boyfriend? But it was sweet of him to try, the sort of thing a friend would say.  
  
He'd never really had a boy as his friend before. He had a boyfriend now, and a stepbrother who no longer despised him, but this was new.  
  
"I'm sorry you're staying here next year," Kurt said quietly. "I'm glad you can," he added quickly, because he of all people understood how big of a victory that was for Sam, "but it would be nice having you around at McKinley."  
  
"Sorry you're not staying here, either," Sam replied with a lopsided smile. He stood and headed for the door, but Kurt stopped him.  
  
"Did you know about the drive-in?" he blurted out.   
  
"What? Oh." Sam grinned sheepishly. "No idea. It's just the only place around here I know, and you asked about old movies and I'd seen fliers for them. I didn't have a clue until it got shut down." He opened the door and Blaine looked stricken.  
  
"Hey, Sam, I was just looking for-" Blaine tried in a fake bright voice.  
  
"It's okay, Blaine," Kurt assured him quietly, but Blaine didn't seem in the least reassured. Sam left and shut the door behind him, and Kurt turned to look up at Blaine with an expression that clearly said, 'Well? What did you want?'  
  
"Is he-"  
  
"It's fine," Kurt stated again with a quiet sigh. He didn't have the energy to deal with Blaine's paranoia right now, not after the night they had already had.  
  
"Does he know about-"  
  
"Do you ever stop looking over your shoulder?" Kurt asked in exasperation, and the look on Blaine's face stopped him. He seemed quiet, small, scared, almost fragile.  
  
But mostly scared.  
  
"No," he replied softly, looking Kurt directly in the eye. "I can't."  
  
It was hard to stay mad at him when he said things like that, when he was open and honest about who he was and how he felt but didn't throw it out there like a weapon. When he looked so genuinely worried...and he  _had_  come here to talk, which he had only really ever done once before. Kurt drew in a deep breath and slid over a few feet on the bed to give Blaine more room to sit.  
  
"I came to apologize," Blaine offered quietly, and Kurt looked at him quizzically because that was not the first sentence he'd been expecting.   
  
"Oh?" he asked simply, not sure he trusted his voice to say anything else. As much as it was hard to still be mad at Blaine, a part of him was - a part of him was angry and indignant because the things Blaine had said shouldn't just go away because he was scared. It couldn't; they had done that before, and Kurt wasn't about to jump back into that.   
  
"For what I said. And...and for not being able to just...give you what you want. It's not fair, and I know that, but-"  
  
"But we can't," Kurt concluded quietly, because he did know that. He wasn't stupid. He knew they couldn't dance in a gym full of people, not in Ohio; it just didn't stop him from wanting it, and he wasn't going to deny it was what he wanted when Blaine asked. Or when anyone asked - that wasn't who he was.  
  
But it was who Blaine was.  
  
"I wish it could be different," Blaine said, his voice high and uncertain. "I wish so much could be different. But in front of our teachers and everyone who's responsible for our recommendations, in front of everyone like that-...we can't. I don't know how to be all the things people want me to be - them, and you and everyone else. I can't..."  
  
"I know," Kurt replied, and Blaine nodded. But that wasn't what was bothering him. The fact that they couldn't dance made him angry, but not at Blaine. What really drove him crazy was- "You really wish I was a girl?"  
  
Blaine looked up, startled by the question or maybe just by its bluntness. "Maybe," he allowed honestly. "Sometimes. I'm crazy about you, Kurt, and I want to be around you all the time and do all these things with you, but even if I know they're not actually wrong, if everyone else thinks that they are it doesn't do us any good. But if you were a girl..."  
  
"We could dance in public and sing duets," Kurt replied dryly. It was like their duet at Christmas all over again, and where it had felt uncomfortable before it now felt almost insulting, even though he understood Blaine's reasons.   
  
Blaine wanted so desperately to be normal. He wanted to be able to go through life being noticed for nothing but his talent - not his clothes, not his physical features, not his race, not his class, not his homosexuality - and anything that stood in the way of that was nothing but a problem.   
  
"I suppose I should be flattered," Kurt said, trying to force himself to sound like he didn't care. He did care; he hated it. He hated it because it wasn't who he was, and it was falling back into the same trap of feeling like things were wrong with them even if Blaine said otherwise, and it was something that would never, ever change. He wasn't a girl, he had no desire to be one even if he did like dancing the girl part and singing songs by women. He was inverse but...not  _that_  inverse. "You could just pick a girl, but you pick me instead. So that's something, right?" Blaine's smile was narrow and vaguely sick, and it wasn't at all reassuring.  
  
But they would be okay. Because Hiram desperately wanted to be normal, too, and he was practically the most unremarkable person Kurt had ever met - with his little average house and his glasses and his bald spot. Hiram was completely normal and led a normal life and had a lover who was beyond fabulous and completely accepting of himself...and they were happy. They just needed a place to be themselves and time to feel secure, and then that was all it would take. He and Blaine would be fine if they could just get somewhere safe.  
  
If. Not when. If.  
  
They would be fine if they got to New York. Right now, Kurt wasn't sure they would make it that long.  
  
"Where are Rachel and Mercedes?" he asked quietly, trying to will himself not to cry. He couldn't. Not now. Not in front of Blaine when all he would want to do was cling to him. He couldn't - he  _wouldn't_.  
  
"Rachel found out Bill hates Rogers and Hammerstein. I don't think she'll be done berating him for awhile."  
  
Kurt smiled faintly and barely covered a sniffle. "I should go - I need to drive them home, Lima's a long way-" He stood, in part so Blaine couldn't see his eyes slowly welling up because apparently no matter how much he told himself not to get weepy, he was going to anyway. It was just his nature, he thought wryly.   
  
Blaine reached up and caught his hand. Kurt stared down at the fingers curled gently around his own, then slowly glanced up at Blaine's face. "You're coming back tomorrow?" he asked.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Come to my room after."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I owe you a dance," Blaine said quietly.  
  
It was a peace offering, and it was small, but after the night they'd had Kurt would take it. "Okay," he replied softly, but he couldn't smile too broadly as he said it and the tears were still threatening.  
  
It wasn't what he wanted - it wasn't really what either of them wanted. It was a half-hearted compromise that left neither of them truly happy, but at least it was an effort and they could both appreciate it.  
  
It was a stopgap, Kurt added to himself as he left his dorm and walked downstairs. Just for a few months. Stolen moments and private declarations for a few more months, and then they would be somewhere with people like Sam, and people like themselves, and everything would be okay.  
  
...If they made it that long.


	35. Chapter 35

he Grad Night bonfire was one of those charming Dalton traditions that was spoken of like a universal rite of passage that would never die under any circumstances. In truth, Kurt almost wished he were staying around another year to be part of it - there was an excitement in the air as the seniors all stood in their uniforms around a roaring fire (buckets at the ready just out of the way of clumsy boys), paraphernalia tucked into jacket pockets, waiting for the moment of the big reveal when they would one by one, reveal where they would be come September. He saw Rick setting up frankfurters and roasting forks over near the bottles of soda pop, which he could only assume meant the well-trained, well-groomed boys would be ditching their blazers and setting their dinner on fire as soon as the school choices were displayed and congratulations issued. The entire affair had a festive feel, a celebration both of having gotten into the many prestigious schools that were represented by pennants and sweaters and ties, and of surviving four years of Dalton's rigorous curriculum.   
  
In a way, Kurt felt like it was a celebration for him, too. Considering Dalton was a place he had never wanted to have to go, he had certainly made the best of it all. He had come into a world that was nothing like anything he had ever known, where every rule and social cue was different, and managed to fit in better than he ever had in Lima - all without losing everything he liked about himself. The work was harder, but the people were kinder and he had certainly thrived academically; no one at McKinley could challenge his academic record from this year, that was for sure. He had met some fantastic boys and made some incredible music...gotten his first solo and his first duet... While he was looking forward to returning home and getting the year he and Mercedes had been looking forward to for as long as he could remember, while he couldn't wait to settle back into his bedroom with its privacy and plush linens, while he was practically jumping for joy at the fact that he was going to get to wear his own clothing again (and did he ever have a lot of shopping to do over the summer, he was an entire year behind!)...a part of him was really going to miss this place.  
  
He felt like a wholly different person than he had been in September, as though every bit of him had changed, and he really  _liked_  the person he had become. Nine months ago, he had jumped up and down and waved to be noticed; now, he could let people see who he was more deeply, more honestly, and without screaming it from center stage. Nine months ago, he didn't understand why he felt wrong - now he knew, and he knew that he  _wasn't_. Nine months ago, he had never understood what all this 'love' fuss was about...and now he knew. So much was different now, so much of  _him_  was different, and he was much happier for it.  
  
Yes; Kurt Hummel had had a pretty good year.  
  
The only non-seniors standing around the fire were his fellow Warblers; they had performed earlier as people arrived, so that by the time they closed their set with Rama Lama Ding Dong, the onlookers were cheering and dancing along with them. It reminded Kurt of his first day at Dalton, of seeing the Warblers for the first time. They really were like Elvis, he knew now; he would miss that when he returned to McKinley. It was nice to be at the top of the social foodchain, even if that did make him a little bit shallow. It felt nice to be cheered for, to be wanted. He hadn't known that feeling when he transferred - now he was almost too used to it. It would be quite an adjustment period to go back...though with everything going on, he doubted that the glee club would be the main target of hatred from the rest of the school.   
  
Things really were simpler here, but he wasn't going to change his dreams for sake of making things easier for himself. He had never been that person and wasn't about to start now. Besides, he would get his own in a year when he was living his dream in Manhattan with Blaine and Rachel and maybe Mercedes if she wanted. It would all be more than worth it.  
  
But for the moment, he could let himself enjoy this night - this celebration of accomplishment and symbolic moving-on. His life was good and about to get even better. What was not to celebrate?  
  
He grinned at Blaine, who had taken his place in the circle around the fire. Things were shaky, but they were better than they had been. Blaine had given him the dance he was owed - they couldn't move very much, but Kurt had been more than content to let Blaine hold him close as they turned in tiny circles between Blaine's bed and his desk to the strains of the Peguins' "Earth Angel". They felt more normal again...still not perfect, no but not nearly as desperate as things had felt the night of their argument.  
  
They didn't talk about it - who wanted to open those wounds again when neither of them could fix it? - but things were inching closer to comfortable again. They had all summer to just be alone, too, before Blaine left for Columbia. Kurt wasn't sure  _where_  precisely, since it was much easier to be alone at Dalton, but Blaine could come visit in Lima. They could spend time with Sam, too, then sneak off to...well,  _some_  drive-in, even if theirs wasn't still operational, or go park in a less-populated area, and they could go have dinner with Rachel and her dads...it would be good for them. Great for them, even. Time to come back together after the past few weeks had tried to rip them apart.  
  
The reveals began with the class president, a boy Kurt knew only vaguely who held far less power than the Warbler Council; the crimson pennant with a large H signified Harvard. He doubted it would be the last one of those he would see over the course of the evening. The first several held up memorabilia from various Ivy League schools to a mix of cheers and good-natured jeering from those attending rival universities. In most cases, it seemed that a few boys knew where each other boy was going, as each had told just a few close friends of his decision; the Council all appeared to know where each other were going, for example. Kurt wasn't sure whether that was unusual or not, or how it stacked up against other years. If it were him, he couldn't imagine anyone in that circle not knowing he was on his way to New York, but he was still a little unusual amongst Dalton boys even if he was no longer seen as completely eccentric.  
  
As the reveals worked its way around the fire, Kurt felt the anticipation building. He didn't know why this moment felt huge, but it was undeniable. Maybe it was the first real tangible move toward their future together, he realized as the boy four from Blaine announced his intention to attend Notre Dame. It was the first step toward everything they had been planning and dreaming about - it was the first time any of it was going to be real, to go from being just something they envisioned to something that would actually happen.  
  
They would have all summer to work out details, he thought excitedly. The boy two down had just pulled out a tiny American flag and a equally-small Navy flag to show he had been accepted to the Naval Academy. That got a bigger reaction - it wasn't a school they saw all the time, if only because so few students nationwide were selected, but all Kurt could see were VJ-Day photographs, sailors kissing girls in Times Square. And if it were anything like what Leroy said, sailors kissing other sailors. But they could spend all summer researching the best places to live, the best areas to be near everything, how to decorate- Because Blaine couldn't get an apartment the first year anyway, Kurt was sure, he would have to live in the dorm, but that was even better. He could only imagine how may fabulous discounted pieces he could find and how many secondhand things he could restore given a year to do so.   
  
The moment was here. Blaine was going to reach into his jacket and pull out the [Columbia pennant](http://www.vintagesportsshoppe.com/photos/cool1.jpg) he had bought for him about a month ago. He was going to announce his destination with a grin, and their eyes would meet across the ring, and it would mean they were really doing this. Kurt clapped his hands together, grinning as Blaine reached into his jacket pocket and revealed-  
  
What was that he was holding and why did it look so red?  
  
Maybe it was just the firelight, or maybe Blaine had gotten another one somewhere - though red wasn't anything like the school colours. Maybe-  
  
He looked at Blaine's face, trying to catch his eye, trying to ask him what was going on, but Blaine wouldn't look at him. In fact, he looked almost the opposite direction past the fire, hesitated for a moment, drew in a deep breath, and plastered on a fake, over-confident grin, and announced ["Stanford!"](http://www.vintagesportsshoppe.com/photos/sttan1.jpg)  
  
That didn't make any sense. Was there another Stanford he wasn't aware of? Was there some other school he could be talking about? Because there was no way they had spent the past five months talking about moving to New York together and living their dreams only to have Blaine depart for California. There was simply  _no way_ -  
  
...There had to be a mistake.   
  
But if there was...if it was a mistake...then why couldn't Blaine even look at him?  
  
He felt suddenly like the world was closing in on him, like his field of vision was slowly narrowing in all directions and a band was tightening around his chest until he couldn't breathe ad he could barely see except for Blaine's face in the flickering glow of the firelight - with that smile that no one i their right mind should believe but apparently people did. People were cheering and congratulating him and debating the merits of its new physics program ad the moving on to the next boy who was announcing that he, too, would be going to Harvard, and suddenly Kurt felt like if he stayed there another second, he would collapse in on himself and stop breathing ad die. He took a few steps back, trying to back gracefully out of the circle - he had already fled the last social event he had attended, and while someone (he suspected Thad at Sam's faux-confirmation) had spread the rumour that Blaine was going out with Kurt's ex-girlfriend, the last thing Kurt wanted right now was to have to explain to the entire senior class why he looked as though he was going to start sobbing in the middle of the bonfire when he wasn't even graduating.   
  
He made it only a few steps before the forced external calm dissipated and left him with only a sense of frenzy and unparalleled betrayal.   
  
How dare he? How  _dare_  he, after  _everything_  they had been to one another? How dare he just leave without even bothering to  _look_  at him, let alone to tell him? How dare he keep turning to Kurt for help, to keep taking and taking only to split for the other side of the country and leave him to fend for his dream - for  _their_  dream - alone? How  _dare_  he swoop into his life like that and make him feel hopeful and like he could do anything and then just  _leave_?  
  
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see, he couldn't speak, he couldn't do anything except run for the nearest escape route. He found it in the side door of the main academic building, the wing closest to the auditorium they used only for formal performances - Founders' and he thought maybe once or twice more, he couldn't remember, all he could think of was that he had walked away from Blaine here and now Blaine was running full-steam away from him.  
  
And if he wasn't crying before, he certainly was now.  
  
"Kurt-"  
  
Blaine had followed him? How surprising. He was surprised Blaine had been willing to be seen with him, with the way students at Dalton might start talking and all.  
  
"I think you already ensured they're going to ask questions."  
  
...Had he said the last part out loud? He turned to look at Blaine who was staring at him with a long, even gaze, as though somehow he were the one who was going to have to talk Kurt down from his frenzy instead of being the one who had caused it in the first place. As though he were outside of all of this when he was the one who made every single bit of this happen. He had to be so damned charming and make Kurt fall in love with him, he had to seek Kurt out and strike up a friendship and then give Kurt hope because they might be able to be together and then  _kiss him_ -  
  
"Well, we can't have that now, can we?" Kurt asked dryly, his voice hard and angry, eyes fixed in a glare. If he were one of those strange villains in the comics Sam left lying around their room, the kind who could shoot laser beams out of their eyes, Blaine would be a tiny sizzling pile of ash right now.   
  
"I know you're upset..."  
  
The patronizing tone was back, the one Kurt had always hated and despised even more now because who was Blaine to act like he knew anything? "Really."  
  
"Kurt, please."  
  
There were so many things he wanted to say, to scream at him in the hallway and not  _care_  who could hear him. There were so many questions he had that it felt like they were all trying to bubble out of him at once and all he could manage was a single word: "Why?"  
  
Blaine didn't know how to answer that. It was...it wasn't a simple question. There were too many other questions to answer first, and even then he couldn't explain it. He couldn't explain to Kurt why because Kurt didn't understand - and he never would. He fundamentally had no idea what the world was really like and it was only because Blaine  _did_  that he had made the choice he had. He wished he could be as naive as Kurt was, that he could let himself just believe in the ridiculous idea of a future together. He wished he didn't know the things he knew about the world - the way they would be treated if anyone ever found out, the way his father would strap them both down in separate rooms to administer the therapy, the way they would become cautionary tales at best and institutionalized misfits for the rest of their lives at worst. He desperately wished he didn't know what that would look like, what  _Kurt_ would look like if that happened to him? He wished he had no idea what chlorazopram did to a person after they were too different for the rest of society to bother dealing with, he wished he didn't know for a fact that one of these days in the not-so-distant future, he would be an emotionless, heartless,  _lifeless_  man, another guy in a double-breasted grey flannel suit and a fedora and wingtips who had to shove his feelings so far down they couldn't be unearthed by an archaeologist because that was the only way to fit in, to survive.   
  
He wished he had no concept of the fact that one day, one day very,  _very_  soon, they were both going to have to find wives and try to pretend to care about being together...about not sharing their lives with one another but with those women instead. And he wished he didn't know that, if they didn't, if they kept living in Kurt's well-meaning, ridiculous fantasy, it would raise nothing but questions for the rest of their lives. And when the wrong person found out, when they answered one of those questions incorrectly...when his  _father_  found out what they were doing and where they were and that they were together...  
  
He couldn't be around for that. He couldn't watch that happen to them, to  _Kurt_...which meant walking away.   
  
But he couldn't take his place as a miniature version of his father, either, at least not yet-...which meant running away at full-steam.  
  
Maybe if he were far enough away, he could be solitary but himself. Not forever, just for a little while. Just long enough to get Kurt out of his system, to slowly taper down the music until he didn't miss it anymore. He didn't need to escape forever, just long enough to transition slowly into who he needed to be instead of being thrust violently into it. That way he could become his father instead of his mother and he could learn to be happy.  
  
But he couldn't explain any of that to Kurt. He couldn't express that because that would require Kurt to understand the reality of their situation, and he never would until it was too late. So he gave the only answer he could:  
  
"Because I had to."  
  
"You had to?" Kurt demanded, folding his arms angrily across his chest. "Really. And how long have you known about this?"  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"When did you pick this? When did you throw Columbia out the window?"  
  
Kurt said Columbia, but he meant " _us_ ", and they both knew it.  
  
"At the last possible moment," Blaine replied quietly, staring just past Kurt's head. Kurt stepped sideways into his line of vision, refusing to let him look away.   
  
"So...yesterday then?" Kurt was clearly being sarcastic because even he, who knew nothing about college, knew it couldn't be  _that_ late.  
  
"A couple weeks ago."  
  
It felt like the air had been physically sucked out of Kurt's lungs and he had to gasp to draw in a breath, wheezing in oxygen as his hand reached out for anything to hold onto. That didn't even make sense, how precisely had Blaine known for a couple  _weeks_  and not told him? How had he not even mentioned it before now? How had he not even though to include Kurt in the decision-making process, or at least given him a heads-up that he was stomping on everything they had planned together and taking delight in watching it shatter?  
  
"A-...a couple  _weeks_?" he repeated, his voice shaky even as his glare grew more steady again. "When? Was it-...after the dance? After I wanted to-"  
  
"No, Kurt, no," Blaine tried to soothe him; it didn't work. "It wasn't because you wanted to dance, I-...we fought, yes, but that wasn't why. I had already sent in the letter by then." From the way Kurt's eyes widened, he could tell it was the wrong answer, though he did have to wonder if there was such a thing as the right answer under these circumstances. Kurt appeared to be furious with him regardless.   
  
It was before the dance. It was before they had tried to have a conversation and it felt like Blaine was slipping away, but they had been mending. They had been coming back together, they had been feeling  _comfortable_  again, how in the hell could he just stand there and act like there was nothing for him to answer for?   
  
...It was before Blaine held him in his arms and they swayed slowly to the music and Kurt felt so safe and contented and normal. That had all been a lie, a ruse. It hadn't been real for a second, it hadn't meant nearly the same thing to Blaine as it meant to him - clearly.  
  
Somehow all of that hurt more than any other part of the decision.  
  
"Why?" he asked again, his voice quieter this time. Tears were streaming down his cheeks even through his anger, but he didn't bother reaching up to wipe them away. What good would it do when they were only going to be replaced by more? "What happened? Why would you just suddenly decide to throw away everything we've been planning, everything we've wanted-"  
  
"You mean everything  _you've_  wanted?" Blaine shot back angrily, six months' worth of frustration bubbling out all at once. "You mean that ridiculous fantasy you've been clinging to?"  
  
"You have, too-"  
  
"No," he replied shortly. "I haven't. I wanted to. I- I wanted to believe it for you, but I never did."  
  
"Well isn't this a fine time to say something," Kurt mumbled.  
  
"You honestly thought it was a guarantee? That it was something we were doing? That it was anything other than a wistful daydream?"  
  
"I thought it was a plan at least!" Kurt shot back. There were a lot of things he could abide - the stares and people treating him like some kind of twisted freak, and his brother making stupid comments, and Rachel's hideous plaid skirts, and being forced out of his town by racists - but he couldn't stand there and listen to Blaine destroy the one thing he had left. The  _one_  thing that had made him feel like there might be something better out there. The one thing that had gotten him through the past several months, through every rough patch they had. Hell, it had been getting him through for longer than that - he'd had the image of the apartment since he was  _ten_ , since he didn't know why he wanted the things he wanted but he knew he needed them in order to survive. "I-...I don't understand, Blaine, since when do you think it's ridiculous? Because it's certainly a better plan than anything  _you've_  come up with. We would go to New York, you would go first because you're graduating," he said, listing off the elements almost as much for himself as for Blaine. To prove he wasn't imagining things...was he? Blaine had agreed to it...hadn't he? They had only been talking about it for almost as long as they had been together. "Then I would follow you, and we would get an apartment-"  
  
"And throw fabulous parties?" Blaine shot back sarcastically. "And be happy forever without so much as a single dark cloud? Be magically carefree together? Live our entire lives as perpetual bachelors and have no one be remotely suspicious?"  
  
"Why would it matter? It doesn't matter in New York - let them be suspicious, it won't  _matter_  there," Kurt stated emphatically.  
  
"Of course it matters there!" Blaine shot back. "You think because it's a city of artistic types and chorus boys, that because it's a city on a coast, it's going to be any different? Everything that's illegal here is illegal there, too. The raid that happened here could just as easily happen there-"  
  
"No, it couldn't. Not if there are a lot of us. If there are a lot of us, people can't touch us-"  
  
"Or they can round us up more easily. And print our photographs in the paper. You think just because it's somewhere else that people are going to think what we're doing is okay? It's not."  
  
"Why do you care what they think? Your parents, the people who don't even know you - why do you care so much if they approve? We won't even be around them anymore."  
  
"Because we live in the real world, Kurt! Not in some fantasyland, not in a Broadway production. We can't just change the script and suddenly have the two boys end up together in the end. Life doesn't work like that."  
  
"Why not?" When Blaine rolled his eyes and shook his head, Kurt demanded, "Seriously. Why can't it work like that? It's our lives we're talking about, why can't we make them what we want?"  
  
"Because that's not the way it's done," Blaine replied quietly in a patronizing tone Kurt hated more every time he heard it. It was making quite a few appearances in this conversation and it made him want to grab Blaine by the shoulders and shake him and tell him he didn't know everything. "I hate when you get like this, so...sanctimonious, as though you know everything and are above it all. You don't know anything about the world you think you want. You have no idea what you're getting yourself into, and then you look down on those of us who know what the future actually holds even though you still have a girlfriend to fool everyone. You still hide behind Rachel. Just because her father's a pervert like us doesn't make it any different."  
  
His eyes widened in hurt surprise at the word 'pervert,' then narrowed into a fierce glare. "At least she knows," Kurt shot back angrily. "Would your  _wife_?"  
  
They both flinched at the word, but Blaine replied, "No, because she wouldn't have to."  
  
"Right," Kurt scoffed. "Because she won't find it at all strange when you can't even kiss her and find men attractive."  
  
"It won't matter. Once I have her, it won't matter anymore," Blaine stated with a quiet, almost resigned kind of confidence, a certitude in something Kurt found so facially ridiculous that he almost wondered if this was how Blaine felt when he talked about New York since apparently he had always found Kurt's dream just this side of hysterical. "I won't feel like this once I have her."  
  
"You can't possibly believe that."  
  
"I only feel this way with you. With everyone else, I can keep control, but with you...I only feel this way with you."  
  
The statement weighed heavily on them both. Kurt felt like he should have been overjoyed - Blaine was saying he was special, making clear that the way Kurt felt about him was reciprocated. But he was flinging it in his face like a wet towel, trying to make it as insignificant as possible. As though he could flick it away and forget about it forever like some speck of dust instead of the thing he was building an entire  _world_  around.  
  
To Blaine, the feeling meant nothing at all; to Kurt, it meant everything.  
  
"It's never going to be okay to be this way, Kurt," Blaine stated, but there was a sadness he seemed to be trying valiantly to cover. "There's never going to be a time we can have the life you've planned for us - a normal life like everyone else's. Not together, not like this. As much as I may wish that were an option, it isn't." He put his hand on Kurt's shoulder and looked him in the eye. "And it never will be. You need to come to terms with that. Even in New York, we would still be breaking the law. Every law they have here, they have there - it's not any different. So go to New York, and be happy with Rachel. But I'm not going to move there and wait for you."  
  
"Well then," Kurt replied, his jaw quivering as he refused to be the one to break first. "Enjoy your life, Mr. Anderson. I hope the California sun is good for you - and that when you get caught with the boys, your wife understands and cares about you enough to keep your secret instead of filing for a messy public divorce. I'm sure your parents would hate that." He turned on his heel and strode down the hall, frustration burning in him as he stalked towards the auditorium.  
  
 _[All](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj_eM72OOoc) that work and what did it get me?_  
  
His steps quickened as he felt himself rapidly coming undone. He would be fine if he could make it to the auditorium, to somewhere he could let it all out. He needed to express himself, to belt out exactly how he was feeling at that moment. To have the moment that only he and Blaine understood.  
  
God, didn't that hurt more to think than he expected?  
  
There was no more 'he and Blaine.' There was Blaine...and there was him. That was it.  
  
 _Why did I do it?_  
  
Where had he gone so wrong, anyway? What was so wrong about wanting the things that he wanted? He was sure Blaine could give him an answer, but really - what was wrong about wanting a future, about wanting something happy in a person's life? Wasn't that what everyone else did? For a boy who was so caught-up in wanting to be - or at least wanting to  _appear_  - as normal as possible, he certainly had a strange idea of what that meant. He wanted to make himself miserable so he could be like everyone else, but it seemed to Kurt that everyone else was trying to find some sliver of happiness in a world that wasn't always kind. Everyone else took comfort in friends and found safety in family and what the hell was so abnormal about what Kurt wanted?   
  
So the person he was in love with was a boy. Why did that mean he shouldn't feel the same way as his father felt about Carole?   
  
 _Scrapbooks full of me in the background_  
  
He was willing to give things up for Blaine, why didn't that matter? Why didn't that count for anything? He was willing to never be a star, to never get top billing, if it meant having this boy in his life - wasn't that important? Wasn't that a sign that he recognized the dream wasn't perfect? In an ideal world they would share credit, but he knew that wouldn't be the case, not as charismatic and universally-loved as Blaine was...and he was fine with that. He was perfectly willing to give up that part of himself if it meant Blaine was in his life.   
  
If it were truly an unrealistic dream, that would be the first part he would add back in: he would get all the credit. And all the solos. And all the glory. But no, he wanted Blaine to be happy.  
  
Apparently that wasn't what Blaine wanted.  
  
 _Give 'em love and what does it get you?  
What does it get you?  
One quick look as each of 'em leaves you_  
  
He flung open the door of the auditorium, storming his way up onstage. The more he sang, the more angry he was becoming, the less sad and the more full of unrepentant, unrestrained, untamed  _wrath_  and resentment. How dare he? How dare Blaine try to act as though this was some stupid fantasy that had no hope of coming true? How dare Blaine take everything they had together, everything they  _planned_  together, and throw it back in his face like that with a patronizing smile as though he hadn't believed in it for a second? How dare Blaine just run away from him without so much as talking to him first? Without so much as pausing to say "Kurt, I'm scared" - would that have been so hard? They already knew the rest of each other's secrets.  
  
Well. Blaine knew all of his. For all he knew, he hadn't even scratched the surface on Blaine's.  
  
 _All your life and what does get you?  
"Thanks a lot" and out with the garbage  
They take bows and you're battin' zero_  
  
All this time and Blaine hadn't wanted any of it?   
  
It wasn't just his own thing to cling to, his own little liferaft of hope to remind himself that there was something out there besides what he'd known. It wasn't just for him - he wasn't envisioning grand salons and duets for himself - it was for them. For both of them. For the  _two of them_  to have happiness together. Because as much as Hiram and Leroy were an inspiration, they still didn't have quite the life that would make either of them very happy or fulfilled, so he had modified it a little, bringing what he wanted alone together with what he thought they wanted as a couple. But apparently not. Apparently it was just for him - a fact it might have been nice to know before right now.  
  
He was amenable to changing small parts, did Blaine not know that? It didn't have to be a chaise, and the parties could be smaller and more intimate, and they could wear matching jackets if it would make Blaine feel more at home. The music could be Judy Garland instead of old movie soundtracks featuring other starlets...but somehow he doubted that was the problem.  
  
 _I had a dream  
I dreamed it for you, Blaine  
It wasn't for me, Blaine_  
  
And to throw Rachel back in his face like that, as though she were some lie on his part -  _she_  had proposed it to him. She had suggested it to  _him_ , to get just as much from it as he did - maybe more. They both knew she cared more about what the people in Lima thought of her than he did, and she always would even when they both escaped. They were in a mutually-beneficial relationship that had nothing to do with dating except for the part where they pretended it did, and Blaine of all people knew that. Blaine of all people knew that there was a difference between something real and something fake, and just because  _he_  had tried to date a girl and failed didn't mean that was what Kurt was doing at all.   
  
 _And if it wasn't for me  
Then where would you be,  
Miss Rachel Berry?_  
  
It was Blaine's loss, he told himself. Blaine was the one who had given something up tonight, not Kurt. Blaine was the one who was going to go make himself miserable because he thought it made him more normal -  _he_  was going to have a fantastic life. He would go to New York in a year, he would have everything he ever wanted, and he would be so happy Blaine would have no idea.   
  
 _Well someone tell me when is it my turn?  
Don't I get a dream for myself?  
Starting now it's gonna be my turn  
Gang way, world, get off of my runway!  
Starting now I bat a thousand_  
  
He could see it now - standing on the stage in front of thousands of people cheering for him as he sang, with no one to upstage or outshine him. With people singing and dancing behind him and the audience enraptured by his talent. Wanting him. Beautiful musical boys who would chase him instead of him chasing incessantly after them. They would want him and not be terrified of whta he meant to them or how he made them feel. And the world would adore him...and someday understand him, too.  
  
 _This time, boys, I'm taking the bows and  
Everything's coming up Kurt!  
Everything's coming up Hummel!  
Everything's coming up Kurt this time for me_  
  
He would have everything Blaine told him he couldn't. He would get every single last piece of the perfect little puzzle and then who would feel superior, hm? Then who would be sanctimonious and patronizing all at the same time? because that world was out there, he  _knew_  it was - he just knew it. He would be famous, and fabulous, and he would have everything he ever dreamed of having that Blaine was too scared to demand for himself.   
  
He would have the beautiful apartment.  
  
 _For me!_  
  
And the elegant chaise he could drape himself across while he read.  
  
 _For me!_  
  
And a job he loved where he could be as creative and eccentric as he wanted as it would be an asset.  
  
 _For me!_  
  
And a circle of friends who found him charming and talented and appreciated him and knew his secrets.  
  
 _For me!_  
  
And fantastic parties with interesting guests and free-flowing champagne and impromptu serenades.  
  
 _For me!_  
  
And a boyfriend who could enjoy all that with him instead of running away.  
  
 _For me!_  
  
He finished the song with a flourish before practically collapsing onto the stage, drained of all energy and emotion. After the night he'd had he could barely move, let alone after the year-...the six-month roller coaster of a relationship that was apparently meaningless now, all the work, all the hope and the agony...he wanted something. He  _needed_  something,  _someone_...  
  
He wanted Blaine. He wanted his boyfriend to hold him and kiss him and make him feel better the way he had before. He wanted his best friend to come sing to him with such genuine enthusiasm and charisma that he couldn't help but start smiling again. He wanted the only other boy in the school who could understand what it was like to have a boyfriend to fix him hot cocoa and let him cry about how much it hurt to be rejected by the boy he had envisioned his entire future with.  
  
He needed Blaine like he needed oxygen.  
  
All that answered him was the echo of the empty auditorium and the sound of his own ragged, exhausted, hitched breathing.


	36. Chapter 36

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who might not have caught the Prologue and/or series notes, just to be clear: this isn't the end. Light in the Loafers is story #1 out of a loooong-ass series. 
> 
> Story #2, is called Family and focuses on Kurt, Mercedes, and Rachel in New York in 1962-63-ish. Both boys have a lot of things they need to work on and work through before they can become...well, happy and healthy members of an adult couple (with each other). So Story #2 will center around Kurt, and Story #3 will take us back to poor Blaine who...let's just say has been coping in an interesting and yet canon way. Story 3 is when we start getting closer to the Blaine we all know and love, so look forward to that.
> 
> In the meantime, there will also be a couple side-stories from the 1950s involving characters such as Puck and Tina.
> 
> So thank you again so much, and hopefully you don't want to come after me with torches and pitchforks after this.

He hadn't been able to go to graduation. He wanted to, he wanted to support his friends who were graduating and to sing with the Warblers one last time, but the thought of having to be that close to Blaine, to see him with that damned fake grin-  
  
He couldn't take it. The thought of it made him physically ill, which was how he justified his absence. It had been easy enough to avoid Blaine during finals, to lock himself in the library during meals so he wouldn't have to sit so near him and remember how nice it felt to have Blaine's hand 'accidentally' graze his under the table between bites of baked ziti; he remembered more than enough without external reminders.  
  
He remembered all the time. It was excrutiating.  
  
It was a hectic day, with student move-out scheduled to begin right after commencement ended - Kurt supposed it was logical for the parents of seniors to not need to make the trip from wherever they lived out to Dalton two days in a short time span, but it made for an afternoon in which too many people were crowded into too-small rooms to lug too-large boxes of happily-discarded uniforms into their cars. Sam's parents had whisked him away almost immediately, complaining of the drive, with barely enough time for the roommates to say a quick goodbye. They didn't need to linger too long on formalities, since Sam would be barely a few miles away all summer after all; Kurt gave it three days before Sam was desperately seeking out somewhere else to spend his days because his parents were driving him crazy. They rode him less hard now that they knew it wasn't his fault, but harder now that they knew he indeed was capable of getting better grades.  
  
Apparently Kurt wasn't the only one whose diagnosis was a double-edged sword. But at least Sam was allowed to stay where he felt like he belonged; Kurt could appreciate that, even if he would miss the boy when school started again in the fall.  
  
His own father arrived toward the tail end of the afternoon. Back when they had been making arrangements, Kurt had expected he would be spending as many moments with Blaine as he could before they were flung to separate towns for the summer...then everything else had happened, and he didn't want to sound desperate enough to make his father change his plans, especially since he did have to worry about the shop and everything. He found himself sitting alone in an empty dorm, surrounded by boxes and suitcases because somehow his belongings had multiplied over the course of the year, feeling truly lonely for the first time in a long while. The gnawing feeling had been common when he lived at home, before Blaine, before he started smiling for no reason other than the inability to stop himself; now it was back with a vengeance.  
  
A book of sheet music lay on his lap, and he absently traced the cover with his finger. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" - should he have picked a different song? Would everything have been different if he could have just picked something else to sing? If he could have just turned down Blaine's invitation to listen to Garland at the Grove, he could have avoided this whole mess. He could have just-...just stayed alone all year and been his perfectly-eccentric, perfectly-lonely self. It would have been hard, but it would have felt better than  _this_  - he was sure of it.  
  
"Hey," Finn said brightly from the doorway, and Kurt dropped the sheet music, flustered by the sudden voice. "Ready to go?"  
  
"Finn," he said with a forced smile as he tried to recover, stooping to pick up the fallen book and shoving it into the nearest box. "I wasn't expecting you-"  
  
"Yeah, your dad got caught up on a big project and asked me to come." He hadn't seen much of Finn since Christmas, just the week of spring break when Finn had spent most of his time working and Rachel had dragged him to every imaginable music store looking for the perfect sheet music selection for audition pieces for schools in New York...because it was never too early, apparently. Finn looked normal, the sort of moderately-contented expression he had always worn except last fall...and Kurt wasn't sure whether it had changed back because the pain of the person you loved moving away to never be heard from again genuinely did fade, or if Finn was just too simple to dwell on things for very long.   
  
He thought about asking but had no idea where to begin.  
  
"And he brought help," Rachel chirped as she appeared beside Finn in the doorway. In a way she was the last person he wanted to see, and he could only imagine how awkward the ride there had been...and how much more awkward the ride home would be as she tried to flirt with Finn while pretending she was talking to her non-boyfriend instead. But in a way she was exactly the right person; she was the only one who really knew what had been going on with him and Blaine, other than Mercedes who had come around but was a little less enthusiastic about it all than Rachel. ...to be fair, most people were less enthusiastic about most things than Rachel was. Besides, Rachel had at least had a boyfriend - however shortlived and disastrous that had been - so maybe she would have some kind of-  
  
...not sage advice, really, because she was still Rachel, but at least a friendly ear.   
  
"I thought an all-boys' school would be kind of intriguing but really it just smells like dirty laundry," she stated, and Kurt smiled very faintly.   
  
"You get used to it," he replied, because it was true - he almost didn't notice it anymore. He wondered what it would be like to notice the smell of sweaty wool again; with any luck, he wouldn't have to for awhile.  
  
"So you ready?" Finn asked.  
  
"Wait," Rachel said, glancing up at him. "Can't Kurt give me a tour first? I've been so curious about this place, and I only saw the one building when I was here for the dance ..."  
  
He regarded her curiously, not sure what she was up to. She cared enough for a tour when he was never going to be here again...why, precisely? All he wanted to do was leave and never see anyone (except Sam) for the rest of his life. Finn looked down at his watch, and Rachel mouthed, "Are you okay?"  
  
He must be out of practice at concealing his discontent. He would need to work on that over the summer; it would be a true acting challenge.  
  
He gave his best 'as if you need to ask' look, which she took as a sign that things were worse than she had anticipated. "I guess we can go on the tour, if it's not gonna take us too long to load everything. Mom's cooking dinner, but it's not too late."  
  
"Why don't you load things into the truck, it would save us time," Rachel suggested to him with a winning smile. "It means getting home to dinner faster."  
  
Finn smiled like that made sense, and Kurt was struck by just what their relationship would look like if they ever had one; at least her manipulation of Finn would be more innocent than Quinn's ever had been. Far less mean, too. "Yeah, okay," he replied. "We'll meet out at the truck?"  
  
"Sure," Rachel replied, and Kurt drew in a deep breath as he stood and attempted to look like he didn't care about any of the things they were going to see, any of the memories he was going to relive as he wandered campus with a girl. It all felt so out-of-place, having her here; for one thing, she was a girl standing in the middle of a boys' dorm, and while he did kind of love her in the way he loved Mercedes - she was a good friend, much better than he ever would have anticipated - if he was going to have a dorm entirely to himself, she was definitely not who he instinctively wanted there.  
  
He wondered if someday it wouldn't feel like his heart was being sliced open when he thought about things that were going to change now.  
  
"Don't throw anything around, there are some breakable-"  
  
"I know," Finn assured him, mumbling, "You break one vase...." as he picked up the first suitcase to take it out to the truck. Rachel took Kurt's hand and practically dragged him from the room.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"So he's just leaving?" she asked as they descended the stairs of the main building toward the Commons. "Just like that?"  
  
"Just like that," Kurt replied quietly, his voice distant as he tried not to think too intimately about it. As he tried not to remember their fight.  
  
As he tried not to remember meeting Blaine on these stairs. The way his hand felt warm as they touched.  
  
"I'm so sorry." Kurt managed a faint smile of gratitude at the sentiment, but it was tight. Maybe things would feel better once he was away from here, he told himself. Maybe it would feel less wrenching once he was in a different environment - one Blaine had never really been in except for one weekend way back when. He wouldn't have to think about Blaine anywhere except at the bar, where he didn't plan on going too soon anyway, and it would hardly seem strange at all to sit on his own bed in his own room alone because that was what he was used to. He wouldn't find himself looking around every few seconds to try and catch a glimpse of slicked-down hair and geometric eyebrows and an infectious grin-  
  
There he was. Flanked by his parents, still wearing his uniform as neatly as ever, walking down the hallway from the Commons. Kurt froze, fighting every urge to run away before he could burst into tears. He swore he hadn't cried this much in years, but these days it felt like tears were just sort of perpetually lurking, ready to sting his eyes at any moment. A look of panic crossed over Blaine's features for a moment before being replaced by something brighter and entirely fake.  
  
He wondered if Blaine's smile would ever be real again. He doubted it would with a girl the way it was with him. He wondered if Blaine cared.  
  
He wondered if Blaine wondered about him.  
  
"Mother, Sir, you remember Kurt, don't you?" he said with just a tiny bit of quiver in his voice that Kurt couldn't understand. It sounded more afraid than sad, but honestly what did Blaine think he was going to do - tell his parents exactly what they had been to each other? He was devastated, not vindictive.  
  
"Yes, of course," Blaine's mother said; she had the same fake smile as Blaine did, Kurt realized now. Was it genetic to be this numb, or just learned? She looked from Kurt to Rachel for a moment with a pointed look.  
  
Right. He was supposed to introduce them, wasn't he? He couldn't believe it hadn't even occurred to him. "Mrs. Anderson, this is Rachel Berry-"  
  
"Kurt's girlfriend," Blaine added quickly, and Kurt wanted to scream at him. After throwing Rachel in his face during their fight, he was going to make it a point to his parents? Really? Who did he think they were kidding anyway? Who in their right mind would believe that he and Rachel were actually a couple?  
  
But did it matter what anyone actually felt, to Blaine? Wasn't it all just about appearances?  
  
"Very nice to meet you ma'am," Rachel said with bright smile, but Kurt was more focused on the strange and yet proud look Blaine's father was giving him. He couldn't read it, but he could tell that Blaine could, and he wanted to ask but he couldn't very well ask  _now_ and it wasn't as though they were going to be alone later for him to get a translation, now, was it?  
  
"I assume you'd like to say your goodbyes, dear - we'll be out by the car," Mrs. Anderson said, turning to Blaine, and he simply gave a nod as his parents departed back the way they had come, leaving the three of them alone at the foot of the stairs.  
  
"Kurt..." Blaine started awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder to see how far away his parents were, as if he were a dog checking how much leash he had left.  
  
"Yes?" Kurt kept his face neutral, a incredibly difficult feat, save the raise of his eyebrow with extreme skepticism that there was anything Blaine could say right now that he honestly wanted to hear. Had they not been through this before, Kurt might have believed it; he might have believed whatever apology was forthcominng, bought any lines about how sorry he was and how this didn't need to be the end. He wanted to believe it. But a part of him knew...this wasn't going to change Blaine one bit, was it? It wasn't going to suddenly make him brave, to feel him slipping away. Blaine would remain exactly as cowardly as he had been six months ago.  
  
He felt cheated. Betrayed. Used. Like everything he had had been freely given and then wasted.  
  
But he also felt lonely. Heartbroken. And frustrated because he didn't  _want_  to be heartbroken or lonely when the alternative was running off without him to California. He didn't want Blaine back if this was who he was going to be. If this was the life Blaine wanted-  
  
He had tried to give Blaine every chance to believe in something better for them, to believe that they  _deserved_  all the good things in life, and Blaine...  
  
...didn't even try to apologize. Didn't say a word, just stared at him with big, sad, sorry eyes that Kurt wanted to trust but couldn't.  
  
"Why?" he asked so quietly he could barely hear his own voice, but Blaine understood him.  
  
"Because someday it was going to have to happen anyway, and I can't watch that," Blaine replied quietly. "Because the world you're envisioning isn't going to exist and I can't-"  
  
"Stop."  
  
"You asked."  
  
There was a tense silence hanging over them as Rachel shifted in her pennyloafers and the boys stared at each other. A year of being able to say anything and everything to each other left them knowing exactly which buttons they could hit if they wanted to detonate the entire thing.  
  
In the end, it was Kurt who moved first. "Well," he said shortly, his tone high-pitched and tight so it almost squeaked. "I guess I should grow up then. Learn to be more realistic."  
  
"Kurt-"  
  
Kurt pulled Rachel to him quickly and cupped her face as he gave her a hard, fast kiss that would have been rough had it come from anyone else; from Kurt, it was just desperate. This was what Blaine wanted, wasn't it? For them to just be happy with girls, to ignore how they felt for each other and who they were? This was what Blaine thought he should do, wasn't it?   
  
But he knew it wasn't. He knew that for all he was trying to show Blaine just how wrong this was, his real aim was cruelty - lashing out because of how badly he was hurt.   
  
She tasted like the wrong brand of toothpaste, and her lips were sticky from the lipstick, and her face was too soft under his palm. Her hands were tiny against his forearms, not broad like Blaine's and nowhere near as strong, and there was no low rumbling in her chest as they kissed. He had always loved that when he kissed Blaine- the sound, the taste of it all-  
  
He wanted to say something to Blaine right then, to ask sarcastically if this was what he wanted to see then, to ask if Blaine had any tips for this because he did such a great job on his own-...but he couldn't. For as angry as he was at Blaine, he didn't think there was any amount of willpower that could keep him mad at the boy if he saw how badly he had hurt him right now.  
  
A part of him wanted to say Blaine deserved it. A part of him said it wasn't fair but at least it was a clean break - not like last time. All of him wanted to sink down in the middle of the floor and not get up for a very long time.  
  
It wasn't until he heard the frantic dash of loafers up the stairs, slipping and slapping, that he finally pulled back. This was wrong, everything about it - every single last bit of his life was  _wrong_  and there was no fixing it.  
  
Rachel looked up at him with big brown eyes, her mouth opening and closing slightly like a fish in surprise, as she tried to unsmear her smeared lipstick. She seemed more stunned than traumatized, and Kurt wondered if she would complain mostly because she didn't have a chance to rehearse first so as to give a more convincing performance. That would be typical Rachel, and the thought was almost reassuring. "So," she said quietly, studying Kurt's face as he tried not to cry, his chest heaving up and down and his hands practically quivering at his sides. "That's over, then?"  
  
He looked up the curved staircase toward the upper level but saw nothing - not the blue wool of a familiar blazer, not the shined black leather of a loafer, not the tie he had hated from day one. There was nothing left in the hall but silence and ghosts and a girl he had never meant to date, let alone kiss.  
  
"Yeah," he whispered, his gaze dropping back to where Rachel stood with a concerned, tender expression. "It's over."


End file.
